Great products are built on even greater foundations. Product Requirements Documents and Concept Notes in Product Management are among the main documents that lays foundations for building products.
Product Requirements Document and Concept Note stands on similar pillars and is one of the major areas of the Product Management lifecycle.
In Product Management, a Product Requirements Document (PRD) defines the value, purpose, and functionality of a product or a feature.
Writing an effective PRD is important in Product Management as it basically serves as a blueprint that communicates with cross-functional teams about what new features and additions could be made to the product in order to achieve desired results.
A Product Requirement Document is generally prepared by the Product Manager that combines various hypothetical perspectives and use-cases to support the feature to be added to a product.
Once the Product Requirements Document gets created, it is shared across engineering and development teams who in turn implements the ideas and concepts to the product.
Here is a great post by Vindhya C on how various companies go about their PRDs: https://www.vindhyac.com/posts/best-prd-templates-from-companies-we-adore/
A Product Requirements Document(PRD) fuels communication between the Product Manager, cross-functional teams as well as other stakeholders.
A typical Product Requirements Document(PRD) covers some major areas such as,
Once you start documenting the answers to these questions, you will get a clear picture of what and why to build a specific product/feature.
A concept note is the modern approach in product management to write Product Requirements and is extensively used at Razorpay, a fintech startup in India. It is more focused on a user point of view rather than a feature point of view.
Concept note in product management defines how the new features will solve customer problems, whereas the Product Requirements Document (PRD) defines how the new feature will solve a business or a feature problem.
Products evolve over time, and so, the product teams should regularly lookout for improvements.
Both PRDs and Concept Notes serve as a compass providing clear direction toward a product's purpose while creating a shared understanding among business stakeholders and technical teams.
PRDs and Concept Notes comes in several different forms and serve a variety of audiences:
Though there has been a lot of debate if PRDs are any more useful because of various reasons like they are more solution-focused or they limit the use-cases that your product can fulfill. At the same time, PRDs help agile teams in many ways such as:
Watch the video below where Khilan Haria, VP of Products at RazorPay in Week 6 of Insurjo, our Flagship Product Management cohort program talk about designing and documenting your Products Requirement documents.
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