Every company is defined by the products it puts out. It’s a centrepiece of everything an organisation does and without it, there would be no business at all. To become and remain successful, each company puts significant efforts toward product excellence as it’s the only way to survive and thrive in the market.
However, a great product can’t be built on effort alone and requires more than just a neat idea. Despite substantial work that may go into it, products sometimes fail as they lack a strong foundation to be built on.
So, before it even starts its life cycle, every product striving for success requires tons of meticulous research and extensive strategic planning. Defining what needs to be done and who needs to do what creates a solid ground for future product development and keeps the whole process from turning into a mess.
Without proper guidance, even the best ideas can descend into chaos once it’s time to develop them and create a real product. And, this is where the product requirements document (PRD) comes to the stage, as a handy instrument to provide that guidance for everyone involved in product development.
The product requirements document (PRD) defines the product that is about to be built and ensures that all stakeholders in the project are aligned and moving in the same direction towards the common goal.
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What is a Product Requirements Document (PRD)?
A product requirement document or PRD is a document that describes the purpose of a product that’s about to be built. This includes defining the product’s purpose, value, and functionality before its development. It also determines the order of tasks that need to be completed during the development and specifies any conditions needed for those tasks to be fulfilled.
A well-defined product requirements document should serve as a starting point in the process of developing the product and act as a guide for all subsequent documents in the development process. Besides the product’s primary purpose and basic functionality, it should also outline the scope of work needed, identify the target customers and how they will interact with the product, and provide means to measure the product performance.
Plus, PRD is used to determine the criteria that need to be met for a product to be released and the timeline of release, specifying when the product is ready. If there’s no Product Requirements Document, the team working on its development is likely to fail as they won’t have a clear idea and understanding of what will be considered a successful build.
PRD plays an important role in keeping everyone who participates in development on the same page. With a proper Product Requirements Document in place, there should be no doubt about what the product is supposed to be and what it’s supposed to achieve.
Guidelines and goals set within the PRD need to be very clear and precise in explaining how the product will meet user needs and what steps should be taken to achieve that.
However, while it defines what the end product should contain, PRD doesn’t specify how this should be accomplished. This allows members of the team working in the later stages of development to add their input and potentially modify the product to reach an optimal solution for its development.
Why is the Product Requirements Document Important?
The main purpose of the PRD is to have aligned all the stakeholders involved in a product release and provide a shared understanding of what the product is and what it should accomplish. A successful product release requires the involvement of multiple teams who all work on their part of the project but still are able to efficiently collaborate with each other. This means that several different departments will work on the products, including design, engineering, sales, marketing, and support.
Product requirements document sets the course and provides general guidelines for the release, thus ensuring that all these contributors operate in sync and creating conditions for the product to deliver what the customers need and on time. As the PRD is basically a blueprint for the product, these teams can use the PRD to describe the product and its purpose to stakeholders, attract potential investors, and create compelling sales pitches.
As mentioned above, PRD is the starting point in the development process and other teams can use it as a foundation for planning their actions and developing their own subsequent documents. For example, engineering teams will lean on the product requirements document when creating a specification that explains the details of implementation for each item in the PRD.
The team in charge of user experience will base their wireframes and mockups on the guidelines from the PRD, while the quality assurance department can create a test plan for every single use case in the product requirement document to ensure their successful execution.
What is Included in the Product Requirement Document?
Depending on the nature of the business it’s created for, the product to be built, and the teams involved, the content of a product requirement document may vary. Still, almost any well-written PRD will feature some combination of the components described below to help you answer the question of how to write a product requirements document.
Goals and Objectives
The goals
and objectives section is crucial for any product requirements document it clearly defines the product that is going to be built and explains why the company is developing that product in the first place. Goals and objectives should provide a precise description of the product’s features, functionalities, and purpose. They explain customer problems the product will address and how will it solve them once released.
By including goals and objectives, PRD ensures that the development team will create a product that serves its primary purpose by creating value and providing an enjoyable experience for the end user.
This part of the PRD puts the entire life cycle of a product into context and aligns it with the broader vision of the company. However, it shouldn’t feature a long and exhaustive list of goals and features that are supposed to fulfil them. Rather, PRD should focus on the basic set of features that will create the right user experience and address customers’ needs and thus meet the desired objectives.
Key Stakeholders
An important part of the product requirements document that often gets overlooked is identifying all the key stakeholders involved in the process of product development. Of course, this section will vary depending on a particular project but should list product teams working on the product as well as any important subject matter experts who may not participate as full-time team members.
The list should include the product manager, product developers, internal or external designers, the document owner, members of the company’s leadership involved with the product development, and any other people who significantly contribute to the process. This PRD section ensures that everyone working on the project will know who they can turn too for whatever they need.
User Personas
Knowing the customer and correctly identifying their needs is one of the key components of successful product development. The user personas section of the PRD helps development teams create hypothetical individuals that should be the match for the target audience. By creating a user persona, those working on a project can better understand who the end users are, what they can use the product for, how they may access it, and when they may use it.
Every person created for the purposes of the product requirements document should be used as an input to determine product user experience and have a specific challenge or purpose that will help the product fulfil its desired goal.
The user personas created for the PRD don’t need to be too detailed, only specific enough to determine how they can view the product. However, they should be diverse and not too similar to each other. This means that it’s often not enough just to merely change gender or age for different user personas. They should also vary based on occupation, personality, background, education, and most importantly the needs the product is supposed to solve. When creating user personas, it’s best to use the most accurate data available, so social media, google analytics, or other audience data sources can be of great help.
Giving names to user personas will help the development team feel that they’re designing the product for the specific someone rather than just a nameless entity or a thing. The team should be able to relate to and understand the user persona as this will ensure that the end product will meet identified needs.
User Stories
It’s always a good idea to support user personas with user stories. They should put focus on the crucial functionalities that the product will provide to the customer. User stories work best when created as short narratives that describe the product features from the user persona’s point of view. The form is rather simple and involves the specific type of user who requires a particular feature for certain reasons. Basically, the user story tells what the customer needs and why they need it.
The pointers from the user stories can be used to define requirements and shape the product’s architecture and design. The product requirements document should only include high-level user stories that can later be broken down into smaller and more detailed segments if needed.
Release Notes
This section of the product requirements document describes what will be delivered and sets the timeline for that delivery. Release notes are among the most important parts of the PRD as they help everyone play their work according to the set timelines and make sure that the product development process stays on track.
Using release notes, people involved in the development process can successfully manage their workload and support the product when they need to and in the way that best contributes to the successful accomplishment of the desired goals. Commonly, release notes contain information on milestone features, names, upcoming updates, and fixes.
Design and Wireframes
Any product requirements document that aspires to be successful must include visual design and wireframes. Through these, engineers are able to grasp the visual vision of the product in development and answer the pain points of user personas. This is particularly important as certain issues can only be identified once the product is visually represented. This allows the product team not only to pinpoint the problems but to find appropriate solutions for them.
Even though there are plenty of tools that can produce high-fidelity mockups, wireframes don’t necessarily have to look beautiful and stunning. However, they should provide engineers and other stakeholders involved with a clear picture of the way the product will be used and how the user will flow through it.
Risks
Before and during the development process, it’s impossible to know for certain whether the project will be a success or failure and predict every issue that may arise in its life cycle. Still, it’s important to, to the best of our ability, recognise as many potential risks as possible.
The Risks section of the product requirements document should identify these uncertainties and note the likelihood of these events occurring along with the impact they may have on the overall process. Having this information available helps the product team determine what actions, if any, should be taken to minimise the likelihood of these issues occurring and reduce the potential impact.
Risks can appear in many forms. A few examples of risky situations are uncertain timelines, the addition of new talent to the team, adding a new code, or involving an external resource in the development process.
Dependencies
The release of every new product will have a certain impact. The purpose of the dependencies section of the product requirements document is to ensure that that impact won’t disrupt any of the company’s existing products. So, it’s important to find out whether the new product may negatively or positively impact anything else currently live on the platform or disrupt any of the already existing frameworks.
Bringing something new to the market and delivering a breakthrough product certainly carries this risk as it’s, by definition, unique and different from the current processes. Managing these dependencies can help the organisation make decisions that are better informed and provide better predictability of product releases.