# Turn business requirements into a plan your dev team can build

Introducing Plansmith, the planning agent for the business side of software. It takes the business context and what needs to be done and creates a build-ready plan and prototype you can hand off to the dev team.

Published: 2026-08-10
Author: Nico Acosta
Category: Product
Canonical: https://www.plansmith.co/blog/introducing-plansmith



<BlogVideo src="/blog/introducing-plansmith/plansmith-film-16x9.mp4" poster="/blog/introducing-plansmith/plansmith-film-16x9-poster.jpg" />

Plansmith helps you understand, explore, shape, conceptualize and organize large enterprise software projects that need cross-team collaboration into a buildable plan that's ready for the engineering team.

It is the business twin of the coding agent.

Planning is the new bottleneck. Coding is no longer the bottleneck. Planning is. Figuring out what's worth building is the most important decision of our time.

## What's new [#whats-new]

You can now plan large scale enterprise software projects efficiently with AI. Start with customer needs or business requirements. Plansmith takes the business context and what needs to be done and creates a build-ready plan with epics, specs, and prototypes that you hand off to the dev team.

No more handing incomplete and ambiguous specs to your dev team that end up in more meetings clarifying what's needed, or worse in building the wrong thing and having to build it again after several rounds of new meetings.

A good spec and prototype are much better than a meeting.

Plansmith is built on four key pillars:

* **Collaboration**: Because planning is a team sport.
* **Context**: Because business has meetings, documents, videos, images, technical documentation, not just code
* **Structure**: Because large complex projects (and even small ones) need a work breakdown structure to plan, build and verify.
* **Handoff**: Because the dev team should get build-ready plans and prototypes where they already work, Jira, Linear or [Radial](https://www.radial.build)

## Why we built it [#why-we-built-it]

The two of us, Nico and Tyler, came from Twilio, building large-scale cloud products used by millions of developers. Twilio is a very complex platform: thousands and thousands of repos, thousands of services, and building anything needed a significant amount of cross-team coordination and collaboration. During our years there we perfected the art of product planning at enterprise scale.

When we started [BrainGrid](https://www.braingrid.ai), Plansmith's parent company, our goal was to empower the non-technical builder. Then we saw folks from enterprises signing up to BrainGrid with a different problem. BrainGrid was built for the solo builder. Enterprise users needed collaboration, because planning is a team sport. They needed stronger context management, and a way to decompose large, complex projects into a buildable structure. They also needed to make sense of the business context and customer needs as context, not just code.

Before, product managers and business analysts either write specs by hand, or throw whatever context they have into Claude or ChatGPT and copy the result into Confluence, Notion or a Google doc. Every time, they rebuild the context, and it is not shareable with their team. As the team has more meetings, handles more documents and needs more integrations, that business context gets harder and harder to manage collaboratively.

When you build professional software, it is still going to be built and maintained by a professional engineering team. That means the specs and prototypes need to be build-ready when they reach the engineering team.

What product and business teams need is the planning agent for the business side of software. That is how Plansmith was born.

It's not about how fast you can build, or how to "move faster". It's about sharpening what is worth building.

We're backed by top tier investors including Menlo Ventures, Next Tier Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures and Rule30.

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## How it works [#how-it-works]

Picture a developer inside an enterprise. She gets a ticket, builds it, and then hears back from the business: "Hey, that's not what I needed."

And she's like, "Well, that's not what the ticket said."

Then there's this whole back and forth clarifying what the original intent was, what needed to be built, what the developer actually built, and how much rework is going to have to be done.

It ends up frustrating for the business. It ends up frustrating for the developer, and a massive waste of time, tokens and meetings. If it had been defined properly from the beginning, the developer could have built it fast, the right way, and the business stakeholders would be happy. The moment is when the engineer realizes that what they're being asked to build does not make sense, and it doesn't matter how quickly they build it.

Plansmith runs the plan from the first question to the handoff. Here is one plan, WhatsApp notifications for a bank, on our Kernos demo.

### 1. Research a problem in depth [#1-research-a-problem-in-depth]

<BlogFigure src="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-01-research.png" video="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-01-research.mp4" alt="The /deep-research command, the line 108 sources cross-checked by two researchers, the agent's work chip, the report's findings with each claim marked agree or disagree, and the context panel showing where the report was filed: company, project and this plan" width="1536" height="2404" beats="[0.2, 1.4, 1.8, 2.4, 3.4, 4.1]" caption="Two research agents, one report, filed under the plan." />

### 2. Gather insights and bring them into context [#2-gather-insights-and-bring-them-into-context]

<BlogFigure src="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-02-insights.png" video="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-02-insights.mp4" alt="A question about what customers said, asking for the Zoom and Zendesk MCPs, the line four moments ranked by the tickets they cost, the agent's work chip, the ranked table with tickets, share and the meeting that named each moment, and the context panel where the plan now holds two of its own sources" width="1536" height="3058" beats="[0.2, 1.4, 1.8, 2.4, 3.4, 4.1]" caption="Second source. This one came from Zoom and Zendesk." />

### 3. Manage business context, not just code [#3-manage-business-context-not-just-code]

The agent is grounded on business context, not just code. That context is built at the company, project, or plan level so you are not repeating yourself. One neat thing is that as you decompose complex projects into sub-plans, these inherit the context and get smarter as you work.

It provides business teams an organizational memory around their planning.

<BlogFigure src="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-ctx-context.png" video="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-ctx-context.mp4" alt="The line meetings, tickets, policies, repos, one place, three levels, and the context panel of a plan: Company, Project with three repos and three uploaded documents, and This plan with the two documents the agent wrote" width="1536" height="1512" beats="[0.3, 1.0]" caption="A plan's context panel: company, project and this plan." />

Context is your competitive advantage. If you have to start from scratch every time, you're cooked. In turn, you can build relevant context as you work at the right level, so your plans get better as the agent learns more.

<BlogFigure src="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-inh-inheritance.png" video="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-inh-inheritance.mp4" alt="The line attach once, every plan below already knows, and a diagram of four tiers: Company, Project, Plan and two sub-plans, with context flowing down each arrow, a dashed wall between the sibling sub-plans, and a note that a dependency is the one door between them" width="1536" height="1354" beats="[0.3, 1.0]" caption="How context flows down. Diagram, not a screenshot." />

### 4. Write specs in minutes [#4-write-specs-in-minutes]

<BlogFigure src="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-03-specs.png" video="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-03-specs.mp4" alt="The request Write the specs, the line six specs each tied to the moment that asked for it, the agent's work chip, and the table of six specs with the moment, effort and readiness of each" width="1536" height="1066" beats="[0.2, 1.4, 1.8, 2.4]" caption="Three words in, six specs out." />

### 5. Break big initiatives into achievable plans [#5-break-big-initiatives-into-achievable-plans]

<BlogFigure src="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-04-structure.png" video="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-04-structure.mp4" alt="A request to structure the work, the line one epic six specs with 15 open questions flagged, the agent's work chip, and the plan tree: EPIC-1, six specs each with its open-question count, and the prototype" width="1536" height="1258" beats="[0.2, 1.4, 1.8, 2.4]" caption="One epic, six specs, and the open questions on each." />

### 6. Create and share prototypes [#6-create-and-share-prototypes]

<BlogFigure src="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-05-prototypes.png" video="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-05-prototypes.mp4" alt="A request for the opt-in and card-blocked flows, the line clickable screens in the bank's own look, the agent's work chip, and the prototype: two flows in the rail and the notification settings screen with the WhatsApp toggle on" width="1536" height="1748" beats="[0.2, 1.4, 1.8, 2.4]" caption="Clickable screens, each tied to its spec." />

### 7. Is the spec build-ready? [#7-is-the-spec-build-ready]

<BlogFigure src="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-06-readiness.png" video="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-06-readiness.mp4" alt="The command /readiness-review SPEC-6, the line ten checks one verdict four questions to settle, the agent's work chip, and the review table: ten rows, each green, amber, red or n/a, naming what to answer" width="1536" height="1298" beats="[0.2, 1.4, 1.8, 2.4]" caption="Ten checks on the spec, the prototype and the code." />

### 8. Hand off where your dev team already works [#8-hand-off-where-your-dev-team-already-works]

<BlogFigure src="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-07-handoff.png" video="/blog/introducing-plansmith/fig-07-handoff.mp4" alt="The request Push the plan to Jira, the line one epic six issues in the dev team's own board, and a Jira project: epic KRN-100 with six issues under it, one of them blocked by two others" width="1536" height="1356" beats="[0.2, 1.4, 2.4]" caption="One epic and six issues in Jira, each with its full spec. Board shown for illustration." />

Plansmith stops when it hands off to the dev team. It works with any issue tracker or coding agent.

## Get started [#get-started]

[Start your first plan](https://plansmith.co). Take that big initiative, understand it fully, and turn it into a buildable plan.

Planning is the new bottleneck. I wish for great software to be built, not just more software.