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What is the best way to write a PRD? With PRD examples from companies you look upto!

PRD - Product Requirement document, is a document that tells you what exactly you are building. Of course you could say, I have an idea & I will just build. Well, yes if you’re a team of two people, this works. You just tell your team what to build and the hope is it will be built exactly that way. Frankly, you really should build this way if it is just you and another person and writing has never been your primary form of communication. Dont get wrapped into this idea of “productizing your way of thinking”. Go with the flow.

Once you do expand your team/are in different locations/different mindset, there has to be a common point you agree with. Lots of teams do this entirely differently, but in all the examples, you will see few patterns emerge. If you are a startup and are just beginning your product journey/area very early stage PM, don’t get flustered by this list (Some PRDs do run 50pages) Here are a few things you should absolutely have in your documentation, I made a simple document covering the absolute basic stuff here.

Whatever templates you end using remember these things :

  1. This spec sheet will be accessed by a lot more people than just your team or the engineering team, so address in detail what is expected of each team to do/prepare for this launch/experimental feature.
  2. Put as many screens/mockups as possible, helps people understand & capture what you are saying.
  3. Don’t go off document - Every time something gets changed, come back and update it here.
  4. Absolutely know what you will do, when you start the document( so obvious) but also DEFINITELY know what you won’t do also, so people don’t go overboard.
  5. No matter how many documents gets written after this one - GTM, Tech doc, User Interviews, Project plan etc. are all linked back to this.

Now here is the list of PRDs that I found, it is obviously an expanding list, so send in yours if you do something different/interesting. You will also notice that as companies spread across regions(check Uber) they have a lot more answers to provide & a lot more risks involved which is fascinating if you are expanding beyond one market. Also, most of these are sourced from one person(or were available on the internet) which means a lot of it was customized for their own teams. Every team functions very differently and had different things to prioritize.

Airbnb

Asana

Figma

Gojek

Gojek PM

Google

Intercom

Lyft

Microsoft

Ola PM

Ola electric

PhonePe

ProductHunt

Square

Uber

Share it with folks that might find it relevant, obviously shoot me msg if this was helpful & what else you would like to read here :)

Thanks to the fabulous people that helped with this, I love the internet friends this project got me!!

Published 29 Jul 2020

Always looking for learning opportunities in product and life.
Vindhya C on Twitter