56: How PRDs Can Help Build A Good Product

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Rajvi Bhatt (Walmart Global Tech), Prathyusha (Usha) Cheruku (UnitedHealth Group), and Arvind Dutta (Microsoft) to talk about how to write a good PRD. Do good PMs need to know how to write PRDs or product requirement documents? PRDs can be useful and a great way to help capture important information about your product in one place, so a good PM should learn how to write one as it is one of the most important documents a PM could create.

Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:31 What a PRD is?
• 04:46 PRDs are mechanisms to help stakeholders
• 07:29 What can go wrong in PRD?
• 10:09 PRDs are sometimes useless
• 12:20 Difference between PR/FAQ and PRD
• 14:10 Backlogs in PRD
• 16:29 One pagers 
• 18:24 PRDs are a way to accomplish the goal of building a product
• 19:15 How PRDs help a product manager
• 22:20 Different documentations and how they change
• 27:31 Version controlling
• 28:28 Focus on the persona
• 29:09 Include a clear problem statement
• 32:21 Do you need a degree to become a PM?
• 34:42 Have interest and familiarize yourself towards the product role
• 36:04 Non-technical people can still be a PM
• 38:41 Adding new features in PRD
• 40:54 Ideas are part of an agile product development process
• 42:18 Adapting to an existing PRD
• 46:30 Document new ideas
• 48:38 Final thoughts