What are BRD , MRD, PRD for Product Manager?

As Product Manager, do you ever get confused what kind of documents you need to deliver? What kind of contents you should put into those documents? Different organizations will also have different requirements on the documents. In some books , they also recommend you to write user segment and user problem , product vision and product strategy.

Here I would like to divide these documents that are required in Product Management

1. Business Requirement Document (BRD)
2. Market Requirement Document (MRD)
3. Product Requirement Document (PRD)

Business Requirement Document

1. Audience: Management team , Finance, Department Head
2. Purpose: To get buy-in to launch new solution or business
3. Description: It depends on your company and your seniority, Product Manager might get involved in delivering BRD. Product Manager can get business analyst or subject matter expert help to create this document.
4. When: Before a new product /solution/project is launched
5. What to include:
   i. Business Problem
   ii. Business impact ( how much cost reduction or revenue increase)
   iii. How many resources we need, who are the stakeholders, what is the financial simulation
   iv. Timeline/Milestone
6. What to expect after the audience read?
   To get buy in

Market Research Requirements(MRD)

1. Audience: Different line managers, operation team, customer support team, product managers, tech, marketing and others.
2. Purpose: To tell your colleague why we need to do this new product/solution and to discuss high level timeline
3. Description: Inside this document, you will find out what are user segments we are targeting, what are the user persona, high level product capabilities to solve the problem and meet customer needs.
4. When : After getting buy-in and before a project started
5. What to include:
   i. Market that we are targeting ? Market segmentation and trends? What are the problem we are solving? And all the supporting data
   ii. User persona
   iii. Product functional and non-functional requirements
   iv. Depends: Some also include product visions, strategy especially those organization using MRD to have major product launch or enhancement.
6. This is template for MRD by Google
   https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u-nxu-supqNG7ay0YTm3dEc1paiTGebbqnuiFumN7tk/edit
7. What they will do after they read :
   i. Marketing team will know what kind of message need to be delivered to the user
   ii. Customer success manager know how to create more successful partnership
   iii. Tech team will understand who are the users that they are serving
   iv. Customer support team will know how to support customer query and do training on their agents.

Product Requirements Documents

1. Audience: Project team, development team, QA team, UIUX designers
2. Purpose: To tell the audience how you want the product to be developed
3. Description: Inside this document, you will find more details on
   i. product features including the design, user flow, mockup
   ii. backend requirements, sequence diagram etc.
   iii. User experience requiements
   iv. Testing requirements
4. When: Before the product development starts
5. What to include:
   i. Document revised history
   ii. What are the product purpose, strategy
   iii. Feature list and prioritization
   iv. Non functional requirements, timeline etc.
6. What they will do after they read :
   a. QA team will know how to create test cases
   b. Tech team will have better ideas on how the product look like and how to develop the product

Summary

Not matter which organization you are in, just keep in mind by having info in BRD,MRD, PRD, even though BRD/MRD might not be written by you, it helps you to launch an excellent product.

Reference:

1. MRD
https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/requirements-management/what-is-a-market-requirements-document

2. MRD
https://www.productplan.com/glossary/market-requirements-document/