Writing clear and concise product requirements documents is important because it defines the product you are going to build. It is like a compass that provides clear direction for the business and technical teams who will be involved in building, launching and marketing the product.
Spending the time to compile the product requirements document ensures the features that you are planning to launch are well thought out and solve real pain points.
In the Objective section of this product requirements document template, provide a brief summary of why this planned feature is important:
After listing out your goals, it’s important to plan how you are going to measure success. For example, you might want to improve your onboarding flow and you will measure whether you have achieved this goal by checking if more new users actually completed the key onboarding steps after this launch.
In this section, list out all the assumptions that you have about the users and their behavior. For example, you believe most of the users will access this feature from mobile? Note it down so you won’t miss this out when communicating the requirements with your team.
To ensure what you are planning to launch actually solves real customer pain points, list out how customers describe their problems with links to related user conversations so your teammates can see how the customers describe the problems in exact wordings.
To gain more insights, do some research on how competitors approach the problem and list our the pros and cons of their handling.
When listing out your proposed options, always match it with the user story so during discussion with stakeholders like designers and developers, they know clearly what problem you are trying to solve and how customers should benefit from the feature. This can greatly impact how they design the user interaction.
When listing out the options, include any assumptions or questions that you have, this can facilitate the discussion with your team as in which option to choose as the final solution.
It’s important to confirm this requirements section with all stakeholders, including lead designer, lead engineer and related business team heads to ensure the solution is well thought out before moving to the actual design phase.
Spending more time on confirming product requirements can actually save you much more time later during the actual implementation phase.
Use this section of the product requirement template to add diagrams, mockups and designs related to the confirmed solutions above. Gathering all these in one place helps your development team understand the context much better.
While you might have thought about a very thorough solution for the problem that you are trying to solve, in reality, features often have to be launched in phases depending on priority. Use this section to list out what is out of scope for this release so everybody knows something is considered, just that it might not be included in this release yet.
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