Service catalog for custom briefs

Context

Superside is a subscription-based agency where customers have access to a wide range of design and marketing services. Communication, project management, and handovers all happen through a single platform — with Project Managers and Creatives running the operation behind the scenes.

To request a project, customers submit a brief. It's the central piece of demand generation, and the very first, most important step toward a project's success.

Problem

Superside's operational premise was to do all the hustle and heavy lifting on behalf of its customers. That covered everything from project creation — triggered when a request came in — to project execution, when Project Managers and Creatives did the hard work.

But keeping project requests as simple as possible and frictionless would create some consequences down the line: less detailed requests led to long planning phases, a lot of back and forth communication, impacting the time-to-start metric, as well as the overall customer satisfaction during project execution. There was clearly an opportunity to find a sweet spot between doing the hard work for the customers but still getting better context from them.

Briefs are at the center of the partnership and what connects customers to the operation. Rather than a mere request form to start a conversation, they needed to work as information-rich documents that guide the team throughout the entire project duration, ensuring everyone works toward a shared vision — which meant arriving with enough detail to cut back-and-forth in planning, let execution start earlier, and reduce review rounds.

Goals

Through research and business analysis, we understood that what was lacking was better guidance on what was important for each service:

• Briefs should be service-specific: you don't brief digital ads the same way you brief video production.
• Decrease time-to-start on projects. Richer briefs should enable Project Managers to be more proactive and plan autonomously.
• Remove blank canvas anxiety: introduce a guided experience and establish a minimal brief quality standard so briefs are not only rich, but also consistent across brands, making it easier for Project Managers to act on them.

Solution

In a way, the solution was already in front of us. In order to price and charge customers, we could use the systemic service categorization we already built and put that in front of customers. That resulted not only in service-specific briefing forms, but also in a storefront where customers knew upfront what Superside offers and what they could ask.

By introducing multi-service briefs, we also enabled better project orchestration and planning, making it easier to execute on multiple fronts at the same time, as the same brief could serve different specialists.

Results

• 15% faster to start project execution
• 25% brief quality score increase
• 30% increase on cross-service briefs, leading to bigger projects.