First-release brief · Worked example
Help a support team find the right source.
A small software company wants support staff to answer product questions using its approved documentation.
01 · Start with one user task
User: a support specialist handling a customer question.
Task: locate relevant guidance, inspect the original passage, and prepare an answer for human review.
Useful progress: the specialist can reach a supported answer with less searching, without losing source context. The pilot must measure whether this actually happens.
02 · Bound the first release
Include
- One approved documentation collection
- Search and source-linked passages
- A reviewed draft-answer workflow
- Feedback on missing or incorrect evidence
- A small, named internal pilot group
Leave for later
- Automatic replies to customers
- All company systems and document types
- Cross-customer private data
- Broad multilingual rollout
- Autonomous actions in support tools
03 · Test the uncertainty first
Question: does the source collection contain the evidence needed for the team's recurring questions?
Ask a domain owner to supply representative tasks and judge the supporting passages. Compare a simple search baseline with the proposed retrieval approach. Record missing, outdated, contradictory, and unsupported answers.
Decision: improve the source material, narrow the task, or continue to the pilot based on the evidence. A more complex model is one option to evaluate.
04 · Make acceptance observable
- Every displayed citation opens the exact stored passage it refers to.
- A question without supporting evidence produces a clear limitation and a route to human review.
- Unauthorized content is excluded; access behavior is checked with representative roles.
- A source update can be traced to its version, and outdated references are handled explicitly.
- Answer quality, task time, latency, and operating cost are compared with the agreed baseline.
Set quantitative thresholds with the client before evaluating the pilot. Keep the tasks, judgments, failures, and resulting decision available for review.
05 · Agree delivery and ownership
Client inputs: an accountable decision maker, authorized source access, a documentation owner, and access to pilot users.
Review points: evidence coverage, a working search-to-source flow, and pilot acceptance. Each review produces an explicit next decision.
Handoff: source code, data-update instructions, evaluation tasks, operating notes, known limits, and named responsibility for deployment and support.
Estimate: issued after checking data readiness, access requirements, and integrations. Any continuing support is scoped separately.