to PRD or Not to PRD - Is that actually the question?
Beks Yelland
VP, Dir of Product | Founder The Female Product Lead | Passionate about: ClimateTech | Empowering Female Product Leaders of today & tomorrow | Advocate of Mental Health & Wellbeing for Product professionals
January 10, 2024
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The process of enabling tech teams to get the details of requirements as ‘up stream’ of the product lifecycle/feature development as possible is IMHO the key to getting any doc process RIGHT.
In days of old when we used to have to write Functional Requirement Documents, Non Functional Requirement Documents or assist our tech teams with (gulp even saying it brings back those memories) Atomic Requirement Documents. The issue with that was both the time it took to write the document but also the lack of sight any of the team who were going to be asked to develop / deliver / execute on that document had whilst it was being written which often took MONTHS!
So when agile became THE thing and we began to communicate with one another in an entirely different way the ONLY thing that mattered was:
Giving the team early sight of what was being considered
Involving them in early discussions and decisions
Enabling proper collaboration across disciplines>> thus ensuring a better outcome for the product/the customer
.... now we avoid building something no one wants anymore as the process took so long or specifying something that can’t be done or shouldn’t be done ‘that way’
So when people ask do we need this doc, with this title, purpose or process my advice is always going to be:
How can you best reach and involve your team up stream? (earlier on in the lifecycle or process)
How do they best like to be engaged?
Don’t ask the product or strategic leadership what they prefer
Ask YOUR teams how THEY can best interact and be involved
The curated synergy between Confluence and JIRA for examples makes sure that any additional documentation can be found and interacted on by the teams up stream of JIRA tickets coming their way and let’s face it if the only benefit you see immediately is that teams pick up tickets quicker through their earlier involvement in the process then that at least is worth considering
So if your preference is a PRD or a Product Brief or just using the hierarchical constructs in JIRA to define the outcome or ‘so what’s of an EPIC or an INITIATIVE
Just make sure that it works for your team to get their input into early discussions and decision making