A product requirements document template, also known as a PRD template, concisely outlines key information about a new product or feature. A PRD template is a dynamic tool that acts as a roadmap throughout the product development process, most often established by the product manager and used by designers, stakeholders, and the whole development team.
Some see product requirements document templates as outdated in the ever-changing modern development world. This isn't the case! Effective PRD templates aren't long - they're comprehensive and concise. Even agile development teams who favor user stories over more traditional development requirements find themselves benefiting from user-focused PRDs.
Pro Tip: Really want to keep it short and sweet? Limit your PRD templates to one page.
Ready to go? Begin customizing your PRD template by:
Before you even start putting together your PRD template, find out everything possible about the specific features you'll be working on in the product requirements document. You can do this by meeting with various team members or with your client directly. The more you know, the easier this process will be.
Product management is a daunting task, and it's all too easy to get bogged down by development jargon, disorganization, and confusing details. You can avoid this by focusing on the big questions at the beginning of the development process, plain and simple.
A good product documentation template should guide you in outlining the key features, functionalities, and specifications of your product.
Back to basics: Think about why your product should be developed and who it's being developed for.
Since product development processes involve so many moving parts (and people!), it's best to establish the key players that make up your product development team as soon as possible.
Product development is notoriously tricky as there are many different parties involved, often with completely different interests and skills (think project managers, clients, investors, engineers, developers, and designers all working together). Having all these parties work on or approve the key elements of a PRD template will help balance their interests and set clear expectations from the get-go.
Slite's sharing and collaboration features help you gather, share, and organize data. You decide who can view the document and who can make the changes, so your information stays secure.
Slite's product requirements document template lets you customize your PRD to suit your needs. You can use a variety of fonts, colors, and styles to create a professional-looking document, and add and remove blocks to get the template you want.
Once you have customized your product feature template, you can use version control to reproduce it and optimize it to meet the needs of future products.
Your Product Requirements Document Template should include space for images, diagrams, and tables. Utilizing visual aids can clarify technical details and make the document more accessible to non-technical stakeholders. Slite's PRD Template lets you include charts and images directly in the editor, which makes adding visual aids quick, convenient, and easy.
By now you might be wondering what a product requirements document template typically consists of. They generally include:
All key team members and stakeholders should be involved in this phase. Don't over complicate your product requirements template and focus on questions like: "Why would someone want to buy this product?" "Who would buy this product?" and "What problem will this product solve?"
This section is key as it informs the product development team of exactly what needs to be built. Good practice when building a product feature template is to link back to the product purposes and objectives. Here's our product specification template to keep your information organized.
This includes key information like release date(s), tentative timeframes, milestones, and dependencies as well as product benchmarks like supportability, functionality, and reliability in your product documentation template.
This is a visual section that shows how the finished new feature or product will look and how the end user will interact with it. Any simple requirements document template should include the main mockups and wireframes.
Our product requirements document template gives you a place to summarize key findings and recommendations, identify opportunities for improvement, offer risk mitigation strategies, and outline plans for future product enhancements, features, and upgrades.
Putting together a good product requirements document template is well worth the effort because they...
When it comes to the development world, it's all too easy for team members to develop wildly different ideas about a product during the development process. PRD templates make sure that essential product requirements are well-documented, which should be music to any project manager's ears.
Great products aren't made in a day, after all. No matter how many times you have to rework your product, the latest product requirements template will still give your team a useful starting point to edit from.
PRD's top-down waterfall approach encourages you and your team to establish a detailed vision for your product right off the bat. Creating a product requirement document template beforehand can help clarify the entire development process and allocate resources faster.
Here at Slite, we want to make the process of putting together a product requirements document template easy for you. Trust us, it doesn't have to be as complicated as it sounds.
Our product requirements document template will act as your product roadmap... all you have to do is brainstorm and fill in the details for your next great product. Slite's product document template allows your product development team to work collaboratively, making each step of the way a breeze, no matter how many times you have to revise it.
Oh... and did we mention that it's free?...
voila! You've made a great start to your product development process. We're sure that your new product or feature is going to be a winner... and we can't wait to hear all about it!