Product Requirements Document

Estimated Time: 30 minutes

A key part of a product manager's role is leading the engineering and design teams to launch product features. The document used to drive alignment among these team members is the product requirements document (PRD).

Why documentation matters

In general, product managers spend a lot of time writing and maintaining product documentation. These documents help internal teams understand the product vision, strategy, features, go-to-market approach, and more. PMs write different types of documentation, including:
  • One-pager: these are short documents that explain a product or feature idea. One-pagers are useful to summarize a product. Here is a great template of a 1-pager by product leader Lenny Rachitsky
  • Product requirements document (PRD): PRDs help create a shared understanding of the product. PRDs are used by various stakeholders including:
    • UX designers to understand the product vision and create wireframes and designers
    • Engineers to inform and guide their engineering work. At large companies like Google, software engineers will often use the PRD to create an "Engineering Design document," a more technical document that refers back to the PRD and outlines technical design of the product
    • QA (quality assurance) team members to write test cases and ensure the finished product meets the requirements
    • Product marketers to understand the vision, and create campaigns or launch plans

PRD Overivew

Writing a PRD

A PRD attempts to answer 3 critical questions:

  1. Why are we building this product?
  2. What should the product do?
  3. How do we measure the success of the product?

Some companies or teams have very specific templates they use for PRDs. In others, the exact format varies. Regardless, there are certain sections which are common to most PRDs, such as:

  • Problem the product is trying to solve
  • Summary of the proposed solutions
  • Goals of the solution
  • Key features or user flows
  • Launch release milestones
  • Success Metrics

Here are a few examples of PRDs templates from different companies

Maintaining a PRD

The best PRDs are "living documents," i.e., they are regularly updated and maintained throughout the lifecycle of a product. As teams discuss and build, it's very common for the original idea to morph. Strong PMs update PRDs (on a daily or weekly basis) to ensure it remains a good source of truth for the what, why and how of the product. Consequently, PRDs often start out relatively small (perhaps just a bit longer than a 1-pager) then evolve as the team begins to build and clarifies the requirements.

Read it: find information in a PRD

Reading PRDs is a useful way to learn to write one. Review the PRD for Product Hunt, a platform for discovery new tech products. Then answer at least one of the questions below.

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