How To Craft A Comprehensive Product Requirements Document (PRD)

How would a product pan out if the development teams have no idea of its goals??

Well, the most plausible case scenario that I could conjure up right now is that perhaps the development teams will remain clueless about how to engineer an?enterprise software solutions.?

That means development teams; including software engineers and UX designers, require something solid or concrete to ensure that they are mutually informed of a product’s goals and visions and whether the final deliverable contains all the desired capabilities to meet end users’ expectations.

This is where the Product Requirement Document (PRD) steps in, helping the development teams to build a shared understanding of a product’s requirements, objectives, and what needs to be included for a successful product release.?

What defines a product requirements document?

PRD or product requirement document lays out a detailed outline of what a product should require or what capabilities it should contain. It’s an exhaustive detail of a product’s value, goal, and features.?

It is created by a product manager to ensure that the product’s requirements are communicated effectively across the development teams and stakeholders, thus letting them know what needs to be accomplished to materialize a successful product build.?

Even a minute detail of a PRD is substantially delicate and could be tricky and consequential at the same time. Therefore, writing a solid PRD typically consumes considerable time and effort for product managers.

To avoid the explanation getting bloated, let’s remember that a comprehensive PRD is the most trusted referenced resource throughout your product development lifecycle.??

What are the essential portions of a PRD??

• It should clearly define the objectives, target users, and expected usage.
• It should list down the quantitative metrics to measure the success/failure of the project once it is launched.
• It should feature a problem statement addressing target customers and the exact use cases
• It should reflect the actual features or sub-tasks of the product.?
• It should show the objective of a product broken down into specific features
• It should visually represent the UX or user journey as wireframes or low/high fidelity prototypes
• It should be informative regarding the tentative release timeline for the product
• It should include stakeholder review and sign-off to bring accountability into the product development

Should a PRD be lengthy or concise? What makes a product requirement document sound effective?

Frankly speaking, a PRD is not supposed to be pages and pages long. Considering people skim reading much of the technical stuff, except picking up main keywords or getting into the gist of a document, it is essential that a PRD should be written as briefly as possible, though without omission of critical pointers.?

Make the document concisely informative with captivating visuals to make it sound more effective. Your planning strategy for a successful product build hinges upon the very efficacy of PRD.

Is PRD a guarantee of a successful product build?

No, not by a long shot!

Even if you write a super-awesome product requirement document, thinking it would lead to a successful project build would be a far-fetched reality. However, the PRD is an inevitable piece of documentation that will certainly give the possible starting blocks that any agile product development teams need as a solid roadmap throughout the product development cycles.

What does a PRD mean to a product manager?

As outlined, a PRD is inevitable technical documentation detailing comprehensively a project’s requirements, goals, and other key components. Therefore, for a product manager (PM), it means the entire vision of a successful product depends on it.?

A project manager is the main responsible individual to craft an airtight PRD, either alone or by employing skilled resources to create diverse facets of the document, including using a designer for mockups and wireframes, etc.?

The product manager should also see that the overall definition processes pertaining to the product requirements are managed well so that the document can further be used as a referenced source material for himself and for stakeholders throughout the product development process.?

How does a PRD differ from an MRD?

PRD (product requirement document) differs from an MRD (market requirements document) or vice versa based on their respective core objectives.?

For example, the core purpose of an MRD is to clearly define the target market, buyers, and user profile, as well as identify the market needs and opportunities for a product.?

On the other hand, a PRD is a comprehensive document detailing a project’s requirements, goals, features, and many other key components, including problem statement, stakeholder review and sign-off, and objectives broken down into specific features.?

To conclude in a nutshell, an MRD should be created before you intend to create a PRD. It helps you determine whether an opportunity is viable and worth pursuing your investment, with an overview of what needs to be done to succeed.?

What are the benefits that a PRD is supposed to have?

• It should have the benefit of being a single source of truth outlining capabilities that a new release must have.
• It should be detailed to promote effective collaboration among development teams, along with support, sales, and market team to finally deliver a complete product experience (CPE) and business impact
• It should clearly define the vision and goals pertaining to the product, along with the target market and user requirements
• It should encourage cross-functional understanding and engagement in the core product development teams
• It should outline a transparent, and high-level trajectory for the product devoid of assumptions regarding its goal, vision, and scope

Steps to write an effective and convincing product requirement document

Since a comprehensive PRD is a linchpin to possibly successful?software product development?or release, the importance of writing an effective product requirement document is tremendous. Therefore, even a vestigial thought of taking it for granted would mean an attempt to downplay its importance which would certainly factor in failure in the new release or how to even start working on a new product.?

Let’s learn how to write a PRD that is thorough, detailed, and easy to grasp.

1. Start with the four W’s (what, who, why, and when)

• What do you want to build? – Quote a clear idea in the PRD about what you want to build and communicate the same across the teams
• Why do you want to build it? – Ensure the PRD mentions a high-level objective to build a product encompassing all development aspects.
• Who are your target users? – target audiences for different products are diversified. Therefore, mention the target users for your specific product. Is it for all customers or the premium ones?
• When do you need the product? – Ensure that the PRD includes a product roadmap documenting all dependencies and internal requirements.

2. Define the core product values

Is your product aligning with your business’s overall goals and strategy? When it comes to developing a product, ensure that it perfectly communicates as an elevator pitch for your business’s value proposition. Communicate the ideas across your development teams about the viability of a successful implementation of a product during the design and development process.?

One of the focused approaches should be highlighting how the product would create value for users by writing a critical user journey or CUJ.?

3. Simplicity wins the writing

Not only in PDR writing, but simplicity also makes every type of writing an effective narrative.?

Therefore, make sure that the pointers, requirements, goals, objectives, or any components that you may want to have in the PDR are written in a language simple and easy to grasp for everyone in the development teams and your stakeholders. Avoid technical jargon or any specific parlance that may affect the readability of your PDR.

4. Make it sound succinct

Brevity is the soul of writing and it also applies to writing the PDR. That said, your technical document should be brief and to the point. Any attempt of writing verbose or lengthy descriptions of items would mean a downright aberration from being meaningful and concise in your PDR. It should be concisely informative.

5. Get clarity on design choices

As a product manager, you should go the extra mile to get clarity on design choices. As a result, it will help you save your development teams from spending too much time. Another way of putting it is don’t push complexity into design engineering. Any hard decision to be made should reflect on PRD.?

One way to bring down the level of complexity is to ensure that the product requirement document is transparently defining the scope.

6. Have clarity on goals, tasks, and user profiles

Unless your profile your user base, along with defining clearly the goals and tasks regarding product build, you will not accomplish the mission of writing an effective PRD.?

To build a product effectively, make sure that your PRD should mention fundamental elements, such as –?

• A user profile – Mention the primary product user most relevant to your business. Focus on the needs, desires, and behaviors of the target users.?
• User goals – Your PRD should define the user goals, what they want to accomplish, and their problem areas so that your team of designers and engineers would find the best solutions. Note down the expectations of your target users from the final deliverable.?
• User tasks – Create users’ goals and explore ways to accomplish them faster.?

7. Create a plan for risk management

Identify and define possible issues that your product would be able to solve over the course of its lifecycle. Identify potential risks and your possible response to them in the future. Most importantly, your PRD should reflect a solid plan or strategy aligning with the overall business strategy of your company.

8. Prioritize and rank release criteria?

Your PRD should reflect how you have prioritized the requirements and goals of a product to bring it to market and keep a tab on evolving needs.?

For instance, if something is indispensable, you can prioritize or rank it as “must haves” and if something should be there, rank it as “nice to haves.” It basically comes down to defining quantifiable success metrics for product build, including functionality, usability, reliability, safety, scalability, supportability, and other factors.?

For example, with functionality, it should mean the minimum performance requirement to release the product. Similarly, usability should define the extent of comfortability in using the product.

9. Determine a goal release date?

Your product requirement document should reflect the definite timeline for a new release. It doesn’t matter if you come up with a rough estimate for setting a goal release date, what matters is setting the timeline would allow you to adapt to a change in priorities.

10. Ensure that key stakeholders review the document?

It is indispensable to ensure that your draft PRD is thoroughly reviewed by the stakeholders associated with the product. It would be great if you manage requirements review online as a central solution to ensure that everyone is accessing a freshly updated document.?

Ensure that everyone in the development team is familiar with the content of the PRD with access to the document, from developers and testers to managers.

11. Monitor performance through success metrics?

Define success metrics, meaning what factors could lead to a successful product build, and your plan to track that success metric. A great way to see the performance of the metric is to monitor the engagement of the users with the new features, including the frequency of how they use the product and other features.

Conclusion

A project requirement document or PRD is the most crucial technical documentation for?software product engineering?in terms of explaining comprehensively the product’s requirements, goals, scope, and many key components. Therefore, writing an effective PRD is quite a delicate process for project managers, as it requires extensive technical knowledge and experience.?

Moreover, the value of a comprehensive product requirement document is unquestionable, given the very omission of it would paralyze the whole vision of a successful product build. Though it may not guarantee a successful product build, it provides a rock-solid direction and coordination among development teams with a shared understanding of what needs to be done to accomplish a successful release.?