PM School Templates

How to write
PRDs - A Primer
What is a PRD?

What is a PRD?

Product Requirements Document more popularly called as PRD is a document

that PMs prepare to document features belonging to a problem statement
It serves as the document that Dev, QA Team use to build, test and rollout
features

Who are it’s audience?

PRDs are meant primarily meant to be used by QA, Dev Team to create test
cases, High Level Design document (HLD), Low level design document (LLDs)
Other dependent squad members who will be developing features to help
with finishing your requirements

What is the need for it?

Most features fail to deliver impact because there is lack of clarity and
understanding across teams
Documentation is key to ensure that expectations are aligned across teams
and everyone is working towards the same goal
PRD is also needed to map out dependencies across squads and drive the
overall business impact
PRD and it's sections

Problem statement
Discussing the scope and impact of problem
Why this problem at this time and business priority of the same
Timeline by which you want to fix the problem

Objective of PRD
State how you will be solving the problem
What are the ideas aimed at solving the problem state above

User Personas (Optional for PRDs with known user profiles)

What are the users that we are targeting with this PRD?
How is the problem affecting them?

Requirements
Breaking down the problem statement into a series of feature
addressing sub parts of the problem
Each feature will have it’s own set of success metrics which wil
roll-up to the
PRD and it's sections

Metrics to be measured for success of PRD

What are the funnel improvement / metrics
Improvement that we intend to achieve in output metrics

User Interaction and Design

Figma and other tools which can be used for this
section

Open Questions that need to be addressed

To be asked by QA, Dev team and filled by Product and
Engineering

Future Roadmap
What is the further features which will be built on top of this
and how this will help the organisation
PRD Creation Steps

Creation of First Draft after getting problem statement from Business/

Product Owner/ Other Teams

Review with Product Owner to see that the PRD is in line with the
expectations of business

Give Walkthrough to Business Team, take inputs and ensure that you are
building the right set of features

Get into design discussion with UI/UX Team to finalise the workflow and
ensure that the overall User experience is as expected
Confirm above step with business parallely

Once design and business sign off is given, you need to give a walkthrough
with Engineering and QA team
This step is also when you may find some loopholes in PRD which other
teams have not thought about - after this you go back to business and
design to do one last set of corrections

Post this you will sit in HLD, LLD, QA walkthrough wherein you will evaluate if
the product has been thought through correctly
After this you coordinate the release timelines by taking into account
inter-dependencies
Example PRD and Problem statement

PRD Link: https://shorturl.at/osEY0

Problem statements to try out:

How would you increase the DAU of a Parking Space

Aggregator App like Parking Rhino?
How would you create a distinct positioning of your mobile
gaming app in the Indian Market?
You are a PM at a Payment Wallet Company, You are
expanding from India to other countries. How will you
choose which countries to expand and what features will
you build?
You are the Product Manager at Slack, how will you
increase it's revenue over the course of next year?
As a Product Manager of Amazon Prime, how would you
improve the search functionality over the next 2 months?
PM School Templates

PRD Section
Examples

Following sections will give examples on how to

write individual sections in a PRD
Problem Statement Objective

Example 1:
1. 30% of my users are iOS and
number of steps for them to reach 1. Improve % of orders from iOS
cart page is more than 5 leading to users from 8% now to more than
huge final drop-offs and cart 30% within 2 months
abandonment rates
2. Introduce captive portal for iOS
2. My Platform is for premium users to reduce the steps to cart
products and not having captive page to just 3 clicks
portal for iOS users is reducing my
GMV potentially

Example 2:
1. (DAU/MAU) ratio for our app is 1. Introduce podcasts, news as
at 8% which is lesser than what is categories to create hooks for users to
considered a good rating of 10% return to the platform everyday

2. We don’t have enough hooks 2. Create a notification framework to

present within our system currently send notifications basis certains rules
leading to users not opening more which can be easily configured and
than 1 or 2 times per week sent by business or marketing teams
User Personas

Example 1: Mobile gaming company Example 2: Policy aggregator platform

Region: Primarily tier 2 and 3 Region: Primarily tier 1 cities

SEC: Lower class SEC: Middle and Upper class

Monthly Income: ~10000 Rupees Monthly Income: >100k Rupees

Dominant sex: Male Dominant sex: Male

Needs: Needs:
1. Financial freedom 1.Easy policy selection
2. Steady income stream 2.Less clutter of policies

Motivations: Motivations:
1. Casual gaming giving easy money 1.Safety of family
2. Highly addictive platform leading to 2. Financial security
repeat usage
Pain points:
Pain points: 1. Confusion between many policy providers
1.English led app discovery funnel 2.Multiple aggregators giving similar inform
2. Very bad withdrawal funnel
3. Lack of trust Triggers:
1. First time entering into corporate world
Triggers: 2. Major life events like marriage etc.
1. Offers and notifications from app
2. Marketing campaigns
Requirements - 1

Example 1: User reviews in EV bike rental

End User: App User

Requirements:
1.Create a feedback workflow for users of our EV post ride completion
2.Display reviews of bikes in app so that users can select bikes with good
condition

Acceptance Criteria:
1.After every ride completion we send a review workflow so that users you can
input
2.We need to do a reviews migration for bikes so that users can start using the
bikes right away

Success Criteria:
1. We improve our NPS score because customers have increase trust in the
bikes they ride
2. We are able to identify bikes which need servicing

Events, Data monitoring:

1.All data regarding bike reviews should be a streaming data coming through
at real time
Requirements - 2

Example 2: Acquisition improvement using Webengage

End User: Business Team

Requirements:
1. We should be able to integrate with Webengage and create customised
notification messages

Acceptance Criteria:
1. There should be no app releases needed to send out these notifications
2.We should have app related data flowing into BI pipeline so that we are
able to measure performances
3. Business Team or Marketing team are able to create their notifications
without dev team intervention

Success Criteria:
1. We see an improvement in DAU/MAU ratio because of

Events, Data monitoring:

1.All details regarding notification opens, delivery should be sent to BI data
pipeline
Metrics - 1

Improving search of OTT Website

1. Average CTR of search results across platforms indicating

relevance
2. Number of searches that have been done on search page
indicating volume of traffic
3. Average Number of movies/ shows played from navigated
through the search page
4. Average of Number of scrolls on the search page indicating
whether the top results are relevant for the user or not

Increase GMV of E-comm website

1. Number of items per order which indicates whether people like the
catalogue
2. Average order price indicating the categories which perform well
3. GMV growth rate over course of months, quarters
4. Average number of orders per user over course of months, quarters
5. Decreasing cart abandonment rate across the platform
Metrics - 2

Improving Referral Program

1. Virality of referral program - Number of new customers onboarded

per existing customer
a. Number of users who have shared the program
b. Conversion rate per user indicating
effectiveness of plan
2. Reduction in the Customer Acquisition Cost because of the program
3. ROI of referral program indicating how much new users got
onboarded because of referral program

Improving engagement of comments section

1. Number of comments per post indicating how many keep using

comments section
2. Number of replies coming per comment on each post indicating the
virality of the post and relevance of comments section
3. Check the overall tone of comments section across posts to see
whether the comments are geared towards positive outcomes or is it
just hate speech
User Design

1. There will be a design team within your organisation with whom

you will be coordinating to create the user flow and UI/UX
2. Many tools are used by designers like Figma, Balsamiq to create
the intended flow with some examples given below
Open Questions

Question Answer

1. It should be configurable at the

widget level2. PMs, Growth
How will we know if a particular
managers should be able set
widget should be placed in a
whether a widget should be
page of delivery app or not?
recommended by a ML engine and
showed on the page or not

1. There should be an internal

What should happen for cache maintained by the featuring
recommendations if ML engine microservice which should be used
crashes for a day? as fallback incase the BI Data
pipeline crashes

The user should be offered the

What should happen when a
coupon with the higher discount to
user a product with 2
increase possibility of them
conflicting coupons?
ordering that item
Future Roadmap

Example 1: Improving customer service

1. We will be integrating with AI models like ChatGPT in the coming

months to reduce Support team’s burden and automate repeatable
process.

Example 2: Improving customer acquisition

1. We will start using marketing tools like WebEngage, Facebook pixel

to improve market efforts

2. App has to built in such a way that we are able to send notifications
through WebEngage without need for app releases every time

Example 3: Contextual pages on delivery apps

1. We will use a combination of user data + geolocation to decide

which restaurant should be shown to user

2. We will curate a separate set of coupons, offers per user cohort

Things to note while writing PRDs

Any stakeholder within the firm (Business, Marketing, QA, Engineering)

should be able to understand your PRD without your explanation

Always call out for the inter dependencies with other teams and ensure
that they are aligned to the timeline that you are chasing

You should make sure Dev and QA team have complete understanding
of end output
QA Team should know in and out of the functional requirements
Role of QEM is highly important as he will have product and
engineering context leading to very important insights which you
may have missed out

The document should be concise and give the overall idea with
minimal description
Always keep the document as small as possible as people do TL;DR
Have a walkthrough at least a week prior to implementation start so
that solutioning and test cases can happen thoroughly
Some teams even follow a T-14 timeline wherein you send out the
PRD for the next sprint by the first monday of current sprint
FOLLOW US
FOR MORE SUCH
INTERESTING CONTENT