Ditch the PRD template and embrace the PRD checklist

The average PRD template has become overly long and burdensome for overworked PMs. An evolving, checklist-based PRD is the way of the future.

Ah, the Product Requirements Document (PRD).

It’s a tradition of the product manager’s life world over. Yet, there’s hardly anyone who is happy with its current state:

And the list goes on…

The average company tries to keep all the various parties happy by coming together to create a PRD template.

It’s usually an earnest effort by some VP of Product. They’ve heard the complaints. As a result, they want to help both their teams and their cross-functional stakeholders.

They create a draft, they get it OK’d with their teams, and then they socialize it with cross-functional parties.

Each team slightly tweaks the template. Most? They add a few requirements and sections.

And it continues on this way as each department hears of the template and adds on.

Talk to your average product manager about writing PRDs — and why they haven’t written one for that next feature coming up yet — and you’ll hear the same set of refrains.

They mostly go like this:

I just haven’t gotten a good 2 hour time-block to write it yet. I wanted to write it last night after work, but I was just exhausted.

What’s going on here? There are four factors at play:

This situation where PRDs are not being completed is not ideal. Most significantly, product leaders end up left in the dark.

As a VP of product, I regularly felt this pain. Other VPs are asking about features, the CEO is asking about features, and the PRD… it’s missing in action.

But it wasn’t just the leaders who missed the PRDs. The designers, the engineers, the analysts… everyone on the core product team also missed them.

What I realized is that product leaders need to relieve the burden on their teams.

The solution is to embrace multi-stage, evolving PRDs.

This means accepting:

If you’re going to switch to such a system of staged PRDs, templates become pretty outdated.

You end up having a bunch of systems and toggles that you don’t use.

Both as a leader and product manager, I find that checklists work better.

You can just check if your PRD has met all the questions in the checklist at whatever the relevant stage is.

When we implemented this on my teams, the feedback was immediately positive: from both PMs and their cross-functional partners.

So what should your checklists be, and at what stages?

In my experience, five steps work best:

So what should each checklist look like? This will depend on team and company.

But here’s what’s worked for me:

I hope that helps you, as a product manager or product leader, create a better solution than PRD templates for your team.

Let’s retire the PRD template. And embrace the checklist.

Aakash  will also be speaking at #mtpcon North America this fall! In his talk, Aakash will share actual screenshots of leading PLG products to examine the evolution of the PLG motion, covering everything from problem communication to monetization, activation, and expansion. He'll provide practical tips to enhance your own PLG strategy. Check out the full agenda here.

Further reading: