7 Great Tips for Documenting Product Requirements

Articles and Posts Aug 30, 2020 8 mins 5837 Views 0 Comments 1 Likes

"It's your shot at selling stakeholders on your vision. Don't waste it."

Product requirements are all around us and, in an agile world, it can be everywhere in your organization. The expansive Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) are long gone and replaced by user stories, prototypes, and storyboards.

So how do you communicate a product's vision? How do you document a product's requirements? Do we even bother to document anything at all?

This article focuses on 7 practical tips that every product manager should consider before tackling any new product endeavor. The focus is on function not prescription on being practical no dogmatic and, ultimately, on being agile and able to tailor the message and method to the situation at hand.

"But the format is less important than the function, said Brittany Skolovy, chief growth officer at the Canada-based children’s messaging platform Kinzoo. She conceives of a product requirements document as a living, co-created set of guidelines for “what we want to build and why it will solve the [user’s] problem.”"

Here are the 7 insights from real-life product managers on making your product requirement document not just effective but also exciting:

1. Decide whether the feature is worth your time

2. Choose a template matching your team's working style

3. Follow the Goldilocks rules

4. Consider corner cases

5. Focus on the message, not the medium

6. Invite stakeholders

7. Write a 'working backwards' press release.

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