Product requirements document
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A product requirements document (PRD) is a document written by a company that defines a product they are making, or the requirements for one or more new features for an existing product. A PRD is often created after a marketing requirements document (MRD) has been written and been given approval by management, and is usually written before (or at least concurrently with) a technical requirements document. It is designed to allow people within a company to understand what a product should do and how it should work. PRDs are most frequently written for software products, but can be used for any type of product.
A PRD should generally define the problems that a product (or product feature) must solve, but should avoid defining the technical solution to those problems. This distinction allows engineers to use their expertise to provide the optimal solution to the requirements defined in the PRD.
A PRD sometimes serves as a marketing requirements document as well, particularly if the product is small or uncomplicated.
[edit] Components
Typical components of a software product requirements document are:[citation needed]
- Title & author information
- Purpose and scope, from both a technical and business perspective
- Stakeholder identification
- Market assessment and target demographics
- Product overview and use cases
- Requirements, including
- functional requirements (e.g. what a product should do)
- usability requirements
- technical requirements (e.g. security, network, platform, integration, client)
- environmental requirements
- support requirements
- interaction requirements (e.g. how the software should work with other systems)
- Constraints
- High level workflow plans, timelines and milestones (more detail is defined through a project plan)
- Evaluation plan and performance metrics
Not all PRDs have all of these components. In particular, PRDs for other types of products (manufactured goods, etc.) will eliminate the software-specific elements from the list above, and may add in additional elements that pertain to their domain, e.g. manufacturing requirements.
[edit] See also
- Marketing requirements document
- Product planning
- Product architect
- Product management
- Requirements
- Requirements management
- User requirements document
