Product Requirement Paperwork (PRDs) are necessary, however there are particular ideas and methods to make sure they attain most worth!
Technical paperwork aren’t at all times enjoyable to jot down. Whether or not it’s technical documentation, pull requests, launch notes, technical specs (aka “specs”), and naturally, product necessities paperwork, or “PRDs.”
For these unaware, PRDs are the usual doc that product managers draft up for his or her engineering and/or cross-functional groups to grasp the what, why, and the way for a sure characteristic concept.
Usually, the format follows one thing just like this:
Folks can get varied phrases that describe technical paperwork combined up, and start utilizing phrases like “requirement docs” interchangeably with out realization of potential differentiation.
For instance a “spec”, which what my staff referred to as them, was used as an umbrella time period that would have been a PRD, but additionally may have been a extra technical or architectural doc owned by an engineer relatively than a product supervisor.
- Introduction
- Drawback
- Use Instances and/or Ache Factors
- Market and/or Prospects
- Options(s) and/or Commerce-offs
- Assumptions and/or Dependencies
It appears clear to me that product managers (PMs) personal the duty of writing strong paperwork that monitor key issues, use instances, options, and technical trade-offs.
However on the flip aspect, product managers threat being scoffed at for writing what could appear to be “ineffective” requirement paperwork which might be all idea and serve no sensible assist in any precise “constructing.”
In the event you’re a product supervisor (PM), you will have encountered conditions the place you wrote a robust PRD, however when you handed it over to your engineering friends, it was skimmed over at greatest, and visits to your web page drop off after the primary day.
So what can we do as PMs to jot down stronger PRDs and ship extra worth to our engineering counterparts (and thus to the product)? Listed here are 4 recommendations on writing and…
