At the high level product requirements development must be:
1. customer needs driven
2. every key requirement should ideally be contributing to creation of some sort of differentiation and
3. gathering should be done collaboratively ie. not only by product managers but in a team with other business units stakeholders
From what I have seen – the most common mistakes people make are not in the points 1 and 2 but in point 3.
Development of PRD should be a very detailed and involved process – involved in a sense that you should not be writing in alone.
Most of the time it’s the corporate product development framework that’s not really set up properly to allow this to happen smoothly – for example you may have mismatching KPIs for product and IT groups which lead to lack of collaboration or your business processes are not properly documented so key stakeholder do not understand the whole development process and each other’s roles.
If you are looking for PRD development structure and framework check out Parcus Group product management software and training – it provides a full end to end product development framework, workflow as well as over 60 software tools for every step of the process including requirements gathering and tracking. Link is: Product Management Software, Training and Consulting Services
Finally in terms of requirements capture you should also specify:
– The priority of every requirement
– Business drivers (eg. strategic, user experience, retention etc) and
– Traceablity factors (so that you can check on what has been delivered in later stages of the project)
I can not attach a full template but here is the summary of the key chapters in the one provided by Parcus Group (specifically for telecom products):
- Initiative Description
- Stakeholders, Roles and Responsibilities
- Business Drivers
- Business Requirements Priority
- Sales Channel
- Customer Eligibility
- Ordering, Fulfilment and Installation
- Customer Adds, Moves and Changes
- Customer Experience
- Product/Solution Features
- Infrastructure Requirements
- Pricing Capability
- Billing and Payment
- Credit Management
- Complaints
- Security and Quality
- Assurance and Support
- Legal and Regulatory
- Reporting and Analysis
- Deployment and Training
- External Data Inputs and Outputs
- Service Level Management
- Operations
- Documentation
- Business Process Requirements
- Other Business Requirements
- Future Business Requirements
- Business Requirements Assumptions
- Issues, Risks, Constraints
