I sometimes find articles that advocate against using PRDs as irrelevant in fast-paced startup races. However, in my experience, a good PRD supports rapid iteration and effective communication between team members of a software development company. That's why I advocate using PRDs and want to share thoughts on making them worth your time and effort.

Five tips to create great product requirement documents

The following tips will help you better understand how to approach the creation of a PRD and what to consider.

Start simple, scale later

Challenge

Startup owners can feel pressured to develop extensive and corporate-like PRDs. This pressure is further exacerbated by the often limited time and resources required to create comprehensive documentation, especially when trying to maintain momentum in our fast-moving market environment. 

Best practice

Here is how to handle these issues effectively:

• Try starting out with a minimum viable PRD template. You can find one online and work with it
• Stay focused on core features and critical requirements
• Use progressive elaboration as your product evolves. It's okay to update a PRD based on additional requirements

Real-life example

Airbnb started out as a simple website Airbed & Breakfast, with one lodging space. Later, they received $600K in funding from Sequoia Capital and Y Ventures to scale. However, everything began quite simple.

Prioritise ruthlessly

Challenge

It's hard to balance innovation and practicality, as we want to put as much into a product as possible. Giving into this temptation, especially with limited resources, is dangerous and is called feature creep. Stakeholders may want more and more features and functionalities added continuously, but you can ultimately cripple your project and derail development timelines. 

Best practice

To avoid these problems, you want to use methods of aligning your development decisions with business goals while maximising impact:

• Link each requirement to specific business goals and set them in your PRD. This way, your development efforts will contribute to the project meaningfully
• Set phases for the project and use milestones to evaluate your progress. This is a classic approach that almost every software development company uses in projects

Real-life example

Spotify is a perfect example of ruthless feature prioritisation. They rejected the idea of video streaming and focused on music streaming as their main differentiating factor.

Make it visual

Challenge

Written documents such as PRDs can leave much room for interpretation and lead to miscommunication. Teams can struggle with visualising user journeys from texts only, often wasting time explaining product requirements and potentially causing costly misalignments between development teams and stakeholders. 

Best practice

There are easy ways to ensure these problems simply don't arise at all:

• Use wireframes and user flow diagrams to help you outline the layout and main interactions of your solution
• Use screenshots, especially from competitors, to provide points of reference
• Consider making basic sketches for your concepts and include them in PRD

Real-life example

Uber product managers actively use mind maps and flow diagrams to organize ideas and demonstrate data. This type of information is what you want in your PRD.

Keep it user-centric

Challenge

Any software development services company can become a victim of focusing on technical requirements over user needs. Teams can become absorbed in feature development without relation to the end users, losing sight of real-world applications and value. I've seen this happen more often than I would like to across various industries and projects.

Best practice

To solve this problem:

• Start each requirement with a user story to align them together
• Embed user feedback into your requirements to reinforce the existence of some requirements

Real-life example

Slack is an excellent example of how a company can use user data (even if it's their own employees) to shape requirements and business decisions.

Enable Quick Updates

Challenge

You want your PRD to be adaptable and easily updatable in today's dynamic business environment. Market conditions change constantly, and you must stay flexible to remain competitive. Competitors roll out updates, and user needs evolve as well – everything should be seen and quickly reflected in your PRD.

Best practice

• Use collaborative tools for real-time updates. Immediately, I can think of Confluence, Notion, or Google Docs to adjust your PRD
• Implement version control for PRD changes and allow your team to track these changes
• Think of creating a simple change approval process to streamline the addition of changes

Real-life example

Discord is an interesting example of keeping their PRD a living document through the community. They actively encourage users to use their SDKs and implement new features into the platform.

Conclusion

As a software development company CTO, I've seen how a well-prepared PRD can affect a project. In my experience, the key to a successful PRD is starting simple, strategically prioritizing features, embracing visual elements, staying user-focused, and maintaining adaptability. 

These principles have consistently delivered results for me. That's why I advocate taking time to prepare a detailed PRD, as it will make everything so much easier. It's important to remember that a PRD is not just documentation – it is a tool that evolves along with the project and can be used strategically to set and maintain its course.