How to write a problem
desk
Dana does not get a brief. She gets a text while she is already walking into a room. That text is the problem. One paragraph.
What is slow. What you already tried. What done looks like.
I used to skip all three. I would type "invoices are a mess" and then sit there while a chatbot built me a dashboard. Dana would have asked which invoices, and then she would have gone to lunch.
This is a bad one I actually sent, and the one I should have sent.
Bad: we need a better invoice system.
Better: I get about forty vendor PDFs every Friday, none of them look alike, I type totals into a sheet and then into QuickBooks. I already asked a chatbot and it made me a landing page. Done is one clean sheet by 3 with the eight columns QuickBooks wants. I still check three PDFs by hand.
The bad one invites a product. The better one is a job. You can tell on Friday if somebody finished it.
You dont need the right nouns. Workflow, automation, invoice management. Those are shopping words. Slow, tried, done. Those are the ones a person can answer.
What is slow is the part that eats the afternoon. Forty PDFs. Retyping Square into QuickBooks. A workbook that only opens on your laptop. Not the company. Not the stack.
What you already tried is so nobody mails you the thing you already bounced off. I already have Square. I already paid for the $400 seat for a month. I already asked ChatGPT. It feels rude to put that in. Put it in. It saves a week.
What done looks like is a sentence you could check without a meeting. Dana can open the file. One row per customer. I leave at 3. "The process is solid" is not done. "I can log in with the test user" is.
If you cannot get it into a paragraph, it is still three problems. Pick the Friday one. Leave payroll for a different text.
I write these on my phone. The typos stay. If you have a sample, it is the ugly PDF or the four rows, names and account numbers pulled first. The paragraph still has to stand without the file.
You can read a problem without making an account. You should be able to tell if it is your Friday before anyone asks you to sign in.