post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Product Management

An Anthropic report on Claude misuse, Intel restructuring and layoffs: This week’s news round-up

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Three creative problem-solving frameworks for ideating with generative AI

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Why great product managers think like therapists

When your product is not THE product by Emily Tate at #mtpcon London 2025

Spotify invests in non-English audiobooks, new product chief at Trainline: This week’s news round-up

What AI can’t—and shouldn’t—do for product managers

How and when to sunset features – Roni Ben Aharon (CPO, Craft.io, Booking.com, Wix)

Louron serves as the Editor at Mind the Product, bringing nearly a decade of experience in editorial positions across business and technology publications. For any editorial inquiries, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Louron Pratt

In this Sunday Rewind post, we go all the way back to the pre-pandemic days of March 2016 when Martin Eriksson shared his thoughts on why Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) don’t always work.
Martin believes that PRDs and various other documents similar to this focus on the solutions, not problems. He says “I believe product manager’s job is to focus on defining and prioritising the customers’ problem, not the solution.”
This means that once you get it in front of the design and engineering teams, you can work together to come up with the best possible solutions to that problem that fit within the scope or budget of the project. However, by definition, PRDs force you to start documenting features and requirements (the solutions) upfront.
Additionally, he mentions how they are often “open to interpretation”. The individual who reads them and has to act on them is generally not the person who wrote them, so you’re basically playing telephone whispers with your product.
Martin offers an alternative and argues that it’s important to go back to the first principles and work collaboratively with research, design, and engineering as one team to design the right product for your customer.
He closes by listing what you should focus on instead of writing a PRD: 
<ul>
<li>Individuals and Interactions.</li>
<li>Working with software (or hardware)</li>
<li>Customer collaboration</li>
</ul>
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-requirement-documents-must-die/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">To delve further into Martin’s argument, read Product Requirement Documents Must Die in full.</a>
<hr />
Want to share your thoughts on this article? <a href="https://community.mindtheproduct.com/c/start-here/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Use Circle—our members’ discussion platform exclusive to MTP members—to drive the discussion and share your product experiences</a>.

core/freeform

Common transformation pitfalls by Marty Cagan

Using principles to make better decisions faster by Martin Eriksson

How to build for creators by Peter Yang

How to navigate tricky work relationships

Organizing around complex products at the intersection of physical and digital by Matthew Cornford

Scaling Empowered Teams: Advice From Nilan Peiris

Bottom-Up Product Strategy – The State of Product, by Susana Lopes

Testing Business Ideas, by David Bland

How to Connect Your Product Work to Your Top Business Metrics, By Pratima Arora

Atomic Product Strategy, By Rob Hayes

SUNDAY REWIND: Product requirement documents must die

ProductTank Bielefeld

ProductTank London

ProductTank Charleston

ProductTank Bogotá

ProductTank Newcastle Upon Tyne

ProductTank Birmingham

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Atlanta

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Rotterdam

ProductTank Cardiff

ProductTank Ahmedabad

ProductTank Braunschweig

ProductTank Columbus

ProductTank Dallas

ProductTank Montréal

ProductTank Córdoba

ProductTank Seattle

ProductTank Köln

ProductTank Chicago

ProductTank Malmö

ProductTank Canberra

ProductTank Belfast

ProductTank Porto

ProductTank Victoria

ProductTank Hyderabad

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Helsinki

ProductTank Perth

ProductTank Reston

ProductTank Charlotte

ProductTank Richmond

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Hamburg

ProductTank Manchester

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Oxford

ProductTank Madrid

ProductTank Des Moines

ProductTank Portland

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Zürich

ProductTank San Francisco

SUNDAY REWIND: Product requirement documents must die

Louron Pratt

Read more

Comments