What should the first version do from start to finish?
Start with people, not commands. Who opens the bot, why do they come, and what do they need to have done by the time they leave? A customer booking a visit, an employee submitting a report and a manager approving a request are three different journeys, and each one needs its own description. Customer journeys are the job of Telegram bot development; internal ones such as reports and approvals belong to Telegram business automation.
For the journey you build first, write down the entry route, the information the bot must collect, the decision points along the way and the message the user sees at the end. Then add the less obvious cases: someone who comes back after a break, someone who changes their mind halfway through, someone who presses the same button twice. These situations make up a large share of real use, and they are the first thing testers run into.
Keep the first version narrow enough that the whole journey can be tested with realistic examples. A list of forty commands with no clear outcome is harder to build, harder to test and harder to price than one scenario that works properly from start to finish. Once that scenario is live and people are using it, you will know far more about what to add next.
Which systems and people does the bot depend on?
A business bot rarely works alone. List every system it reads from or writes to, such as a CRM, a booking calendar, a warehouse database or a spreadsheet, and for each one note who manages access and which data the bot needs. Matching rules matter here: how the bot recognises an existing customer, and what each status value means. Settle these with the people responsible for each system, because they will have to live with the result.
Write down the restrictions too. Which roles exist, and what is each allowed to do? Do users need to give consent before they receive messages, and how do they opt out? At what point does the conversation pass to a person, and who picks it up? These answers shape the design as much as the main scenario does.
One practical rule: never put passwords, API keys or bot tokens in the brief. Instead, record that access is needed, which system it is for and who will provide it. That keeps the document safe to share and makes every dependency visible at a glance.
How do you turn the brief into acceptance criteria?
For each scenario, describe what should happen in the normal case and in the most likely failures: required information is missing, an integration does not respond, the same event arrives twice. For every case, specify two things: what the user sees, and what ends up in your business record. If those two do not match, someone will notice the gap sooner or later, and it is usually a customer.
Before work starts, also settle the practical side. Who receives the source code and access to the server? Who keeps the bot running after launch, and who responds when it breaks? What does ongoing support include, and what counts as new work? Writing this down now saves awkward conversations later.
A clearly defined first scope has one more benefit. When new ideas come up, and they always do, each one can be described, estimated and prioritised as a separate change. Without that baseline, extra features slip in as unspoken assumptions, and nobody can say which work was planned and which was not.
Checklist: bot brief
- Describe one complete task, including a returning user and a cancellation.
- List the integrations, the records involved and who controls access to each system.
- Write the messages users see when something goes wrong or when they cancel.
- Specify what the business record should contain in each scenario.
- Settle acceptance, code handover and ongoing support before development starts.
Example: job reports from a field team
A field team uses the bot to submit the status of each job together with a photo. A supervisor reviews the submission, and only an approved update is written to the job record. The brief covers a missing photo, a duplicate submission and a moment when the server is unavailable, and for each case it states what the technician and the supervisor see.
A general customer chat and payments were discussed but deliberately left out. They are recorded as possible future decisions, not as part of the first version.
