Build the deck brief
Build the deck brief
You need a quarterly update deck for your leadership team. The goal is not “show the numbers” — it is to get a specific decision: moving budget from one channel to another. You will ask an AI assistant for the deck's spine.
Fill the four brief slots — audience and decision, the claims they must believe, the evidence each claim needs, and the constraints — then compare with the reference version.
A strong example (self-assessment — not machine-graded)
Audience and decision: the leadership team; we want approval to move 20% of the ads budget into the newsletter channel for one quarter. What they must believe: (1) newsletter engagement is growing while ads have plateaued; (2) newsletter subscribers convert roughly twice as well as ad traffic; (3) one quarter is enough to test the shift with clear success metrics. Evidence: growth claim — the six-month engagement chart; conversion claim — the cohort comparison table; test design — the proposed success criteria and stop conditions. Constraints: fifteen-minute slot, ten slides maximum, every title a full-sentence claim, no paragraphs on slides, speaker notes one short paragraph each in my register, end with the single ask slide.
Hint
The deck is an argument: the beliefs list is the argument's skeleton — write claims, not topics.
Constraints shape the output more than adjectives: time slot, slide count, title style.
Why this is the answer
A deck brief works when it names the room (audience + decision), the argument (claims they must believe), the proof (evidence per claim) and the shape (constraints). Given all four, an AI assistant produces a spine where every title is a claim and every claim has its evidence slot — a deck that can be checked before a single pixel is designed. Without the beliefs list, you get topic soup with your numbers stapled on.