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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 product managers and used by technical teams, designers, and other stakeholders.
Some see product requirements document templates as outdated.
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.
A Product Requirements Document (PRD) outlines the features, functionalities, and constraints of a product being developed. It serves as a guide for developers, designers, and stakeholders, ensuring alignment on product goals, technical requirements, success metrics, and user needs throughout the development process.
Think of it as a living document that evolves as product requirements change, acting as a single source of truth (SSOT) that everyone involved in the product can turn to for guidance.
A PRD is a detailed document that defines the product being developed, outlining its purpose, features, functionalities, and behavior. The primary goal of a PRD is to ensure that everyone involved in the product development process is on the same page and working towards the same objectives. By aligning team members, a PRD maximizes efficiency, reduces misunderstandings, and sets clear expectations. As a living document, it can be updated as the product evolves, ensuring it remains relevant throughout the development process.
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. This is your scope. The scope section outlines what is a current priority and what will not be included in the release. Conducting customer interviews is crucial to gather valuable insights that inform your understanding of customer needs and assumptions. 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 managers have 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. Understanding customer personas can significantly enhance your comprehension of the target audience and their needs.
A good product documentation template should guide you in outlining the target audience, key features for different personas, functionalities, and success metrics 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 core team as essential members who understand customer and business needs, making up your product development team as soon as possible. Your PRD is a living document that serves as foundation for product jams.
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). As a Product Manager, it's tough to bring so many different people on the same page.
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.
It's much easier to explain wireframes to technical teams using sketches, than try to go on in boring old text.
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. Understanding customer problems is crucial when defining the product's purpose. 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?” All you’re trying to do, is build a starting single source of truth for all product related info.
This section is key as it informs the product development team of exactly what needs to be built. Functional specifications are crucial in this context as they provide detailed guidance on the essential functionalities the new product must fulfill. Good practice when building a product feature docs is to link back to the product purposes, objectives, and use cases. 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.
Setting a target release date is crucial for better planning and coordination among teams, providing stakeholders with a clear timeline for product releases.
A successful product is an intuitive product. 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. While your final product may look different, you need to focus on the bare minimum to create a starting point for conversation.
Our product requirements document template gives you a place to summarize learnings from monitoring your key performance indicators, identify opportunities for improvement, offer risk mitigation strategies, and outline plans for future product enhancements, features, and upgrades.
In Agile development, teams work from themes, epics, user stories, and tasks. And a common trait of all agile requirements, is giving yourself room to adapt. To create a shared understanding among team members, it’s crucial to discuss user stories, flesh out assumptions, and keep track of open questions. Prioritize features based on user value above all else, and break down each requirement into small, manageable tasks or user stories. Involving the entire team in the creation process ensures understanding and buy-in from everyone. Regularly review and update the PRD as changes occur to keep it aligned with the project’s progress.
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. Product development teams use PRD templates to ensure clear communication among stakeholders, making sure that essential product requirements are well-documented, which should be music to any project manager’s ears.
PRDs should include feedback loops to ensure all team members are informed. 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. Let them pitch in their ideas on user experience, product strategy, sprints, and the product lifecycle. Most importantly, encourage them to ask open questions. Sometimes, open questions and discussions turn into the best AHA moments later.
PRD’s top-down waterfall approach encourages you and your team to establish a detailed vision for your product right off the bat. Showcasing a product vision serves as a guiding principle for the team, helping to articulate future goals, assumptions, and plans to stakeholders. Creating a product requirement document template beforehand can help clarify the entire development methodology and allocate resources faster.
Important note: Many companies adapt existing PRD templates to suit their specific processes and organizational needs. You, too, should pick and tweak a template with the goal of being able to use it again and again.
Agile development emphasizes flexibility and adaptability, and a PRD should reflect these principles. A lean and concise PRD focuses on high-level direction, team goals, and business objectives. It should include background and strategic fit, assumptions, user stories, user interaction and design, questions, and what is not being done. A one-page dashboard can be a useful tool for keeping a PRD lean and concise, providing a quick overview of the most critical information.
A PRD is instrumental in creating a shared understanding among teams and stakeholders. It helps align everyone across all key aspects of the product. The PRD template typically includes several key sections: What, Who, Why, How, and Questions and iterations. These sections gather comprehensive information to create a detailed product requirements document. Moreover, they become excellent resources for other documentation that your team might create in the future. The PRD should be used to track progress and provide a clear understanding of the project’s requirements and its impact on users.
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 your workflows 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!
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