What is PRD in product management?

In the Internet industry, product requirements documents (PRDs) have been the most important artifact product managers create. PRDs mainly describe why the products/features are needed or not needed and what kind of features should be implemented so that everyone in the team is to be on the same page. PRDs can be read by all stakeholders including executives, therefore the technical writing skill is so important for product managers to reduce miscommunications. Other artifacts will also be created by other stakeholders based on a PRD. Engineers will create technical specifications which describe how each item in the PRD will be implemented, designers will create mockups if necessary, data scientists will create data analysis plans to better understand their customers, and QA testers will create test designs to ensure every single use case in the PRD can be successfully executed. You need to create PRDs so that these core readers can easily understand them. What should a PRD contain, then? In fact, there is no determined template, but the following is a basic outline of what should be included in a PRD. You can create your own style based on this.

• Product Summary - Explain what you want to develop and why you are developing it
• Product Scope - List out all components and use cases of the product with priorities
• Feature Requirement - Describe requirements not specifically but at high-level for each component
• Proposed Timeline - Assume how long the development is going to take for each team

In short, a PRD will contain every information for releasing the product from scratch. However, at the same time, a PRD should generally avoid dictating specific implementations in order to later allow interface designers and engineers to use their expertise to provide optimal solutions to the requirements.