A brief is the objective you assign to a Crew. Unlike a one-off question in Chat, a brief represents a goal the team works towards over time, on its own, with you checking in where you have asked to be.
Writing an effective objective
Create a brief
Briefs are managed on a Kanban board at Crews > Briefs.
Click Create Brief and complete the form to add your brief to the backlog. From there it can be scheduled or manually executed when needed.
Required fields
Field | Description |
|---|---|
Title | A short name for the brief. |
Objective | What you want the Crew to accomplish. Be specific, the Team Leader uses this to build the execution plan. |
Assign to Crew | The organisation whose Team Leader will plan and coordinate the work. |
Objectives best practice
The objective text guides how the Crew approaches the brief.
Clear and specific:
Good: “Monitor our email campaign open rates and alert me if they drop below 15% for any campaign.”
Avoid: “Watch our emails.”
Outcome-focused:
Good: “Identify our top 5 customer segments by lifetime value and suggest retention strategies for each.”
Avoid: “Give me insights about our customers.“
Measurable:
Good: “Find opportunities to improve conversion rate by at least 10%.“
Avoid: “Make things better.“
Optional fields
Field | Description |
|---|---|
Description | Explanation to human team mates describing what the brief covers. |
Success criteria | The conditions that define a successful outcome, used by the Team Leader when it synthesises the final result. |
Recurrence | Run the brief once, or on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule with a set time, timezone, and (for weekly) specific days. See Recurring briefs below. |
Xtremepush instance | Which instance the brief interacts with, unless you mark it as not requiring Xtremepush. |
Email sender details | If the brief involves email campaigns, the From address and From name to send under. This should match a validated email sender in your Xtremepush project. |
Require approval for sensitive actions | Pauses the Crew for your sign-off before it takes any action with a real-world side effect. See Approval for sensitive actions below. |
Approval for sensitive actions
Turn on Require approval for sensitive actions when creating or editing a brief. Xperts then pause and ask for your sign-off before taking any action. When this happens, the brief moves to Waiting for Approval and you are notified. You can:
Approve - the brief continues from where it paused
Reject - the brief stops and moves to a terminal state
How a brief executes
When you execute a brief, the Crew works through up to four phases.
Planning - the Team Leader reviews the objective and each team member's capabilities, then posts an execution plan to the brief's channel in the Control Room: the tasks, which Xpert handles each one, and any dependencies between them.
Execution - tasks run in dependency order, up to three at a time. Each Xpert works from its own task and the outputs of anything it depends on. A failed task is retried once automatically before being marked as failed.
QA review - if the Crew includes an Xpert with "QA", "quality", or "validation" in its name, it reviews task output before synthesis. A task that fails review gets one revision round from the Xpert that produced it.
Synthesis - the Team Leader combines every task's output into a final deliverable, measured against your success criteria.
Once a brief moves to In Progress, it executes in the Control Room, where you can watch its progress in real time.
Brief status lifecycle in full
Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
Backlog | Defined but not yet started. The default status for a new brief. |
In Progress | The Crew is actively working. Visible in the Control Room. |
Waiting for Approval | Paused at a checkpoint. Needs your approval or rejection to continue. |
Review | The Crew has finished; awaiting your review of the results. |
Completed | The objective has been achieved and reviewed. |
Failed | The brief encountered an error during execution. |
Cancelled | Manually cancelled before completion. |
Recurring briefs
Set a brief to run daily, weekly, or monthly, with a specific time, timezone, and (for a weekly schedule) which days it should run. When a recurring brief completes, it resets to Backlog and runs again at the next scheduled time. This suits regular reporting, monitoring, and analysis tasks, for example a brief that runs every Friday morning to analyse the week's campaign performance.
You can also replay a completed brief from its card. This is useful for re-running it with the same configuration, after external data has changed, or after you have adjusted the Crew's Xperts or org chart. You can see the 'Previous Runs' by clicking on the brief and scrolling down to the bottom.
Best practices
Keep each brief focused on one objective
Turn on approval for sensitive actions on high-impact briefs
Complete or cancel a brief rather than leaving it active indefinitely
What's next
See Monitoring the Control Room to follow a brief while it runs, and check the Inbox for any approvals it raises along the way.