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Invoice letter format for Product Management

hello and welcome back to the product pup where we talk about all things tech business startups ideas product and everything related so today's video is all about product requirement documents simply put a prd is a place for you as a product manager to document everything about what your product should do it's also a place where other people like designers and engineers can collaborate with you to finalize all of the requirements around what this product will do before you actually start building it now there are hundreds of templates on the internet for prds so definitely check those out i personally have never found one that i completely love and so i decided just to make my own mine is nothing special it is just a google doc with some headings and some descriptions below for what should go into each section now why did i decide to make this video two reasons one i recently put up a prd template on my website that you can download it's editable and you can use that as you like and that's what i'll be walking through today and secondly i actually got a bunch of messages and feedback after i put that template up for people asking how to actually use this document in the best way possible if you want to walk through the document with me then check out my website i'll also leave a link to the document directly down below if you like these walk through deep dive style videos please let me know i made a video like this a few months ago for a product roadmap template and that has been one of the most successful videos i have made to date and based on that i realized i want to continue to make really practical videos that give you something that you can take away and apply to your job immediately if you have any other ideas or requests for what kind of templates and walkthroughs and demos you would like then please let me know and i will be sure to include them in an upcoming video now let's get into the walkthrough for this product requirement doc now let's jump into the actual template now this is nothing fancy it's very basic in google docs you can make it look pretty what i wanted to do for you here was really lay out the structure so that you can focus on the content start with some basic information i won't go too much into this detail the main thing i want to mention here is how important it is to have a version number and the reason being that your product requirements can go through so many different versions while you are in the planning phase from the original idea that you have all the way through to being ready for development a lot can change this is just a table of contents and this is something that is dynamically updated um based on the headings we have in the rest of the document so always recommend having a table of contents again this is something super basic but it's also something very easy to miss something as simple as this can make life for your reader and for you really really easy now let's get into the specifics of the actual sections the background section should give the reader a summary of the product initiative about one to two paragraphs that gives the reader some context so that the rest of the document makes sense what does the reader need to know so that the next section that they read makes sense background should be general enough so that anyone can understand it whether it's another product team if it's a designer if it's an engineer or if it's an executive broad enough high level enough giving them context so the rest of the document makes sense all right next section is objectives now objectives are really what you are targeting to achieve through this product initiative what are the goals that you have for this product initiative board and they have a i want to show you a really great resource that can help you write objectives and just get your head around what a product objective is so product board is a fantastic tool for creating product roadmaps but they also have really really good resources on things that product managers need to know so um they have an article here about defining your product objectives and i wanted to show you some examples so first and foremost product object objectives should be clear measurable and inspiring goals so remember the objective is really thinking about the ideal outcome you could have think big think about your vision and think about really specific things that you want for customers for the business value and for the product let's work on an example together let's say for this product initiative you are building a mobile app now let's say you're building a mobile app so that you can target a new customer segment that typically only uses mobile devices and that means it will increase the overall adoption of your product so an example of your objective might be increase mobile product adoption by 20 over the next six months all right that's a very simple example the next section is problem problem is quite self-explanatory so i would recommend just writing as much as you can around the problem you're trying to solve and i think as much detail as you can go into with the problem will help to build the case for why you need to build this initiative so if you have uh stakeholders or executives reading this document then remember that you want to make the problem really compelling for them you want to create the incentive to build this product so you can talk about the problem in lots of different ways including gaps in the existing product that need to be filled you can talk about how it's difficult for customers to do certain things and also how business growth and value is limited or challenging and i this is something i think is easily overlooked so i want to highlight this when you're talking about the problem it's really important to talk about the problem you have for your customers right at the end of the day you are building this product for customers who are most likely paying for your product but if you can build a product that helps customers and it helps to solve any internal problems you have for your business that is killing two birds with one stone so i would also write separately um have a section that has internal business problems sold and you know this might be things like uh process efficiencies it might be um cost savings well these won't be the main reason why you're building this product they are side benefits to you doing it and again that is just going to add to your overall use case and the compelling incentive it should create the next section is value proposition now value proposition is all about the benefit and the value this product will bring to your customers position is all about the customer and the benefit that it will bring to them think about the jobs that your customer or user has to do and how this product will make those jobs easier are there certain things that the customer or user can now achieve that they previously couldn't um is there something that will make your customers life overall easier by you working on this product and that's the customer side of it and then on the business side of it you want to think about overall positioning and uh benefits for your business so how will this help to grow the business what edge will you have over your competition one of the main things to highlight in the value proposition section is why this new product initiative or feature means your customers will pick you over your competitors typically you want a value proposition to be unique startups typically have unique value props or unique selling propositions think about how the value proposition is something that is going to be really hard for your competitors to beat are you building it in a certain way that they won't be able to copy are you creating value and benefit for your users that your competitors just won't be able to match so basically think about how your value proposition and your benefit is unique and how it is unique enough so that your customers will continue to take you and your product over any others have a look at how startups define value proposition and you'll find a ton of examples i'm going to add an additional statement here which is a value proposition as a simple statement that summarizes why a customer would choose your product or service and then i will actually also add this link if you want to read more about writing a value prop a really simple formula for writing a value prop is we help x do y by doing z the next section is a release phases and i think release phases requires quite a bit of work release phases will communicate to people how you plan to launch this product depending on the product maybe you can launch it all in one go but if it is a bigger product a more complex product maybe it has a lot of moving parts you may want to actually release it in different phases and that's what the release phases is now you will have to work with your engineering team on refining the release phases all i'm saying is have a think about how you want to approach the market when it comes to launching the product marketing team will also be interested in how you are planning to release this product so i find high level release phases really useful to communicate with other stakeholders that don't necessarily need to know all the specific details of what is included in a release now i typically leave goals and success criteria until much later in the process because i need to understand a little bit more around what exactly my product is going to do goals and success criteria is something that is going to be very specific to again you and your product i typically evolve this a lot through the process of planning the product and even during the process of it being developed think about what the goals are for you this might be around product adoption it might be around product usage it might be acquiring a certain type of customer you want to work with your business stakeholders to figure out what the goals are and you also want to work with your engineering team to make sure that you actually implement a way in the product for these things to be measured the next section is use cases quite self-explanatory and it is what your customers need to do what they are trying to do and that this product will enable them to you can learn about your use cases through talking to customers directly through working with a researcher or even working with your product designer but it's really important to have clear and specific use cases because if you don't have use cases well defined then there will always be a floating question mark over why you're building this product if you can try to use specific customer names try to use revenue figures to help build a picture for who has these use cases again if you have a business stakeholder reading this document and you can say that x customer who makes your company x millions of dollars has this use case that again adds to being a much more compelling story to build this product the next section is solution overview now this is not the how we're going to build this is what we're going to build now we're getting to the details of what your product will do so what are the capabilities and features of the product that are going to solve the problems that we described earlier now if i use the example of the mobile app again i will write capabilities like you know users should be able to create an account and log in they should be able to view whatever your app allows them to do they should be able to create xyz they should be able to edit xyz write this for someone who isn't going through the detailed requirements but they can read this list of capabilities and features and understand what the product will do high-level user experience in this section we want to write down a few bullet points around how a customer will discover this product how they will access it how they will set it up and how they will use and interact with it again a very brief bulleted list that can give someone a snapshot into where in your product or where a user needs to go to actually use this thing is it you know logging into a website is it downloading a mobile app is it a combination of the two is it um is this a feature that's already a part of an existing product that the user will then need to navigate deep into that existing product to set things up we are going to include as many links as we can to the actual design so you'll have to work with your product designer on this but are there mock-ups are there storyboards are they user journey flows any low or even high fidelity designs just link them here the next section is competition overview competition overview is a part of market research and you probably will be doing market research as a separate piece of work that will feed into the requirements now i will typically do competition and market research much before i start writing the product requirements um but what i want to do here is link to that competition or market research that i've done and maybe highlight any specific things that are worth calling out and would be interesting to someone you know navigating this doc the main thing you want to do in this section is explain how this product you are building sits against the competition so it might be a good idea to include a graph or some kind of visual that plots where your product that you will be building will sit against the competition this could be a matrix it could be a um a graph like i said any kind of visual but that's the main thing to convey and then you can actually just do a link out to the market research that you've done and if someone is interested they can go and read it there and now we're getting into the super specifics of what does this product do so you can see that we've actually done a lot of work already before we've even started talking about specific product features super important to lay the context and the foundation of what you are building before you actually dive into the specifics of what you will be building i think it's very easy to get carried away talking about features and capabilities um and you always have to remind yourself to come back to the bigger picture of what you are doing why what is the purpose and that's why it's really important to make sure that context is in this document so key features and releases my personal preference for writing features and releases is in a table it helps my brain organize everything much better than if i was just to write bullet points let me do this with you so let's just say downloading and installation of the app okay i'm writing this in a very scrappy way so don't mind that another one might be setting up and account creation um another one and then you can go through in detail you know depending on what your app allows you to do you would go and write those features in here and then i will write the user stories for each of the features now i may also have multiple user stories for each feature which is very likely and then i will decide which user story is going to be part of which release and then write very specific requirements for each release in this table so the user story might be as a say um and then my requirements for this let's say i'm in crew i'm including account creation as part of release one which is probably very likely considering i need people to create accounts before they can use the app so here i might say something like allow user to all right this is the example of the top of my head but these are the kind of things you want to do and then you can think about how you might want to improve the setup process in release 2 and write the requirements for that hair now i will typically have a first go at this myself expect my engineering team to build this document with comments there will probably be comments around every little thing i've written um to clarify exactly how it will work or suggesting better ideas um and that's what the point of this stock is the purpose of this doc is not for you as the product manager to write the requirements and to give it to engineering to implement it is to start the collaboration process you may have a pretty extensive user stories and requirements table for me this can end up being you know multiple pages depending on the product once you've done that we are almost at the end of this document but i'm almost at the end of this document so the last section last two sections we have what is out of scope and we have questions and decision tracker we want to make sure that we are clear about the boundaries we are setting for this product what are we including in the scope of this product and what is explicitly not included now you don't have to necessarily know all of the outer scope items up front that you will notice that they will come up in a lot of discussions with engineering and product and design so you can continue to extend this list to be really clear about what you are not working on and then this is really important so as your document starts to get attention and a lot of people start collaborating on it questions will be asked you'll be having various meetings with product um and design and engineering lots of questions will come up decisions need to be made and it's great to have a way to keep track of all those questions keep a track of when they were asked and what the final answer was because then you can look back at this at some point in the future and remind yourself should someone ask you why you decided not to do something or why you did it in a certain way and that is it for this video walking you through a product requirement document i do hope this was useful and if you got this far thank you so much for watching come across other cool templates then please comment them below because it will really help everyone else as well if you are on tech doc don't forget to check out my account it is called product pop and it's where i post daily videos all about tech product business startups ideas and everything related thank you so much again and i will see you in my next video bye