How To Write A Good Product Requirement Document

What is Product Requirement Document

The PRD describes the product your company will build. It drives the efforts of the entire product team and the company’s sales, marketing and customer support efforts. It’s hard to come up with a more important, higher leverage piece of work for a company. If the PRD is done well, it still might not be a successful product, but it is certain that if the PRD is not done well, it is nearly impossible for a good product to result.

TEN STEPS TO A GOOD PRD

Step 1: Do Your Homework
This includes studying your customers, your competitors, and your team’s capabilities, including available technologies.

Step 2: Define the Product’s Purpose
The product requirements need to specify exactly what the objectives of this specific product release is, and how they will be measured. The objectives should also be prioritized.

Step 3: Define the User Profiles, Goals and Tasks


Step 4: Define your Product Principles
It is very valuable to try and identify a set of product principles that will guide the entire team throughout the project. These principles will be specific to your domain and your particular project.

Step 5: Prototype and Test the Product Concept
This is the stage where you actually come up with your product ideas. This is where you want to be as creative and innovative as possible. For most products, however, you can do a very significant amount of product validation testing at this stage, using various forms of prototypes and testing including Feasibility Testing, Usability Testing, Product Concept Testing .

Step 6: Identify and Question Your Assumptions
It is very easy to make assumptions and not even be aware of them. Make sure you don't specify a candle in the PRD and prevent yourself from getting a light bulb.

Step 7: Write It Down
It is important that the PRD be something that the entire team can easily access, it won’t get lost, and that the PRD needs to be in a form that can be updated throughout the project. The PRD is comprised of four major areas Product Purpose, Features, Release Criteria, Schedule Make sure your description covers: > The problems you want to solve, not the solution > Who is the product for? Companies, Customers, Users > Details are great, but the big picture must be clear > Describe scenarios

Step 8: Prioritize
Beyond clear requirements, it is important to prioritize and rank-order every one of your requirements using MoSCoW or other techniques.

Step 9: Test Completeness
Now that you have a draft of the full PRD, you will need to test the PRD for completeness. Once the stakeholders have all reviewed the PRD and identified any areas that need additional details or clarification, and you have addressed these issues, you now have a PRD to build a product from.

Step 10: Managing the Product
PRD is a living document, and you should track all features in the PRD through product launch. During the course of implementing the product, there will be countless questions or issues identified, even with the best of PRD’s. Attend and resolve all questions about requirements by pointing people to the PRD. If it is not in the PRD, add it in the PRD. You need to quickly resolve all the questions and issues, and to record these decisions in the PRD.