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