How to Write a Product Requirements Document?
How to write product requirements document (PRD) and why is it important
Since you’re here, you can be a product manager who wants to develop their product requirements document writing skills, a product manager wannabe, or a newbie. It doesn’t matter who you are, I hope this story finds you well and helps you to write better PDRs.
So, shall we begin? First things first, what is a Product Requirements Document?
For your information, I’ll use PRD instead of the Product Requirements Document.
A PRD is an item used in the product development process to help to communicate between development, testing, and design teams. A PRD must include everything from the very beginning to the release of your product such as from your aim to success metrics.
A successful PRD includes these 7 topics:
- Purpose/Goal
- Features
- UX Flow & Design
- System Requirements
- Release Criteria
- Timeline
- Analytics
Purpose / Goal:
Explain what is your aim to develop this product and what problem you want to solve.
What problems does this product solve?
Who will use this product?
Why is it important?
Features:
For each feature, you should contain a description, goal, UX flow, feature requirement, release criteria, and use case.
UX Flow & Design:
It’d make your PRD more affluent if you add UX flow for each future. You can describe your features more fluently with designs or wireframes. If you’re using Figma, notice that Zeplin makes this easier. When you describe the whole UX flow, you can be sure that it’s going to be a good PRD.
For example, your UX Flow should include;
All screens of your product — error states, error messages, required fields, pop-ups, tooltips, etc.
Page transitions
System Requirements:
In this part, you should describe the behaviour and features of a software or system.
Release Criteria:
Goals for release. For example, easy to understand, achievable or measurable.
Release Criteria cover these:
Functionality: You must to ensure the product is easy to use
Reliability: Make sure your product can recover from system failure.
Performance: Set a goal to measure your product’s performance such as its speed.
Timeline:
To write this chapter, you can ask yourself the following questions: What will be delivered and when.
Analytics:
How you will measure the success of your features? Create scenarios to understand customer behaviour.
How often each feature / button is being used?
Q&A: What are common questions about your product? Write those down in this chapter.
!!!ALERT !!!
A PRD is never truly complete.
PRDs are living documents, you can not write a PRD and walk away from it. You have to know that, you’ll always go back and update it regularly for you, your designers, and developers because PRDs help you & your team to understand the purpose of the product and its current status. And also a good reminder to stay tuned and keeps you in scope.
Why do you always go back to your PRD? — Because, your product is an evolving, living creature. As long as it grows, there’ll be always new requirements, user stories, etc. There’ll always be holes or things that teams didn’t understand, don’t forget that a PRD is never truly complete. A good PRD always changes over time.
To determine the holes in your PRD, you can set up meetings with teams and go through the end-to-end user flow.
Don’t forget to link everything for your stakeholders.
Why do you need a PRD?
The main purpose of PRDs is to get all the stakeholders on the same page. Creating a product successfully requires the collaboration of multiple teams such as development, design, marketing, sales, and support. After reading PRD, you can be sure that all of you will be in sync.
You can create your PRDs, or you can use templates on Mural, Miro, Coda, etc.
PRDs often confused with Marketing Requirements Documents (MRD), but of course, they’re different. I’ll talk about this in a different story to keep this short.
This story will always be updated by way of illustration a PRD.
Best Regards,
