part seven · feature brief

Feature Brief

Observation, journey, direction, prediction, sign-off.

The Feature Brief is the cycle's primary artifact. One Initiative Brief contains several Feature Briefs over its life. Each Feature Brief is small enough to fit a cycle and load-bearing enough to be worth predicting.

Where the Initiative Brief describes the gap, the Feature Brief describes a single named change to close part of the gap. It carries the prediction the cycle will check.

Required sections

FEATURE BRIEF

Title:               Grading: native Hebrew name support
Initiative:          Grading Flow v2
Cycle:               Cycle 17 (2026-05-05 → 2026-06-05)
Owner:               Alex (PO)
Designer:            Maya
Tech Lead:           Yossi
Status:              Discovery / Active / Shipped / Killed
Last reviewed:       2026-05-05

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1. Experience snapshot
   150–200 words. Day-in-the-life narrative. Named person,
   specific moment, specific pain, specific outcome.

2. Purpose
   One sentence — what problem this solves.

3. Emotional aim
   What feeling should the named person leave with?

4. In scope
   Specific capabilities, not vague.

5. Out of scope
   Explicit exclusions, with rationale.

6. High-level user flow
   Step-by-step in plain language. No UI / tech detail.

7. Prediction
   Baseline, target, check date, check method, owner.

8. Success signal
   The leading signal that says the feature is alive.

9. Open questions
   Must be resolved before story-writing begins. Owner + timing.

10. Sign-off
    PO + Designer + Tech Lead. Dates.
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Experience snapshot — the centre of the brief

The most valuable section is the experience snapshot. 150–200 words. Day in the life. Named person. Specific moment. Specific pain. Specific outcome.

It is Wednesday morning. Gal sits down at 08:50 with her coffee and opens the LMS to grade the morning's batch of CS101 finals. The fourth submission is from a student named Yael Rosenberg-Hayut. The system displays her name with the hyphen and accents broken; the surname looks unfamiliar. Gal pauses, recognises the issue, opens her secondary spreadsheet to look up the correct name, copies it, edits the LMS field, and continues. By the time she has done this for the seven Hebrew-named students in the batch, ten minutes have evaporated. By the end of the cycle, almost an hour. After this feature ships, Gal opens the LMS, sees Yael's full name correctly, grades, and never thinks about the spreadsheet again.

The snapshot is what makes the brief impossible to misread. It contains no UI language. No feature names. No technology. Just the felt moment.

Prediction — the cycle's claim

A single prediction, written in the form the corpus uses everywhere.

Prediction:    Native Hebrew name support eliminates the spreadsheet
               workaround at journey step J6. Time saved per
               cycle: ~3 minutes mean. Cumulative cohort impact:
               ~6 hours/week.

Baseline:      Mean cycle time 47 min (n=12, captured pre-feature
               in Discovery, Apr 2026). Workaround used in
               5/6 observed sessions.

Target:        Cycle time mean below 44 min (signal). Workaround
               used in 0/6 observed sessions (causal).

Check date:    2026-06-15 (10 days post-flag-enabled).

Check method:  Three named-grader observation sessions. Time-on-task
               instrumentation will be in place but observation is
               authoritative.

Owner:         Alex (PO)

Volume V Part 2 will read this prediction back. Without it, that section has nothing to do.

In and out of scope

The corpus's pattern: name what is in scope as concretely as possible, and name out of scope as the explicit ground that future features will cover (or won't).

In scope:
  • LMS displays Hebrew names correctly across all unicode forms
    used in the customer's student database.
  • The grader-facing surfaces (queue, review, comment) all show
    correct names.

Out of scope:
  • Bulk re-rendering of past grading reports. (Will be addressed
    in a follow-up cycle if patterns suggest demand.)
  • Right-to-left layout improvements unrelated to names.
  • Student-facing surfaces — student grading view is not used by
    Gal and is out of this feature's scope.

Sign-off

The brief is not active until three signatures land: PO, Designer, Tech Lead. Each one is signing on something different. The PO signs the change is worth making this cycle. The Designer signs the experience is shapeable in this scope. The Tech Lead signs the change is buildable in this scope under our constraints.

Each signature has a date. The dates compose a record of when the trio aligned.

What it produces for the rest of the chain

Volume	What it inherits
III	The Experience Snapshot, the prediction, the in/out scope. Stories are sliced under this.
IV	The success signal — the analytics events to instrument. The prediction — the before metric.
V	The check. The signal reading is written against this brief.

Part 8 — Technical Design Brief →