Discover a Simple Receipt Format for Product Management to Streamline Your Process

Simple receipt format for Product Management

hello and welcome back to my channel I am very excited to bring you this video today because we're going to be talking all about product requirements and doing a deep dive in-depth walkr of a new product requirements template that I put together for you now this isn't the first time I have talked about product requirements on my channel so this will be a 2022 version of my product requirements template now the reason I'm doing another product requirements video is because just over a year ago I made another product requirements video on my channel sharing a template with you guys and doing a detailed walkr of exactly what you need to do in a product requirements Doc and to this day that video is by far the most popular video on my channel so I decided to do a bit of a refresher on product requirements I want to answer some of the questions that have come up in that previous video directly and give you more guidance and I've also tweaked the template a little bit I've updated and refreshed the way that I think about and create requirements myself and so I really hope this 2022 version of product requirements and the new template that I have is going to be very useful for you as always the template is going to be completely free I will link it in the description below you can grab it either from that link or you can go to my website I will make sure you know exactly where to find that template as as always leave any questions comments clarifications on product requirements but just on product management in general I will answer every single question I promise you and it doesn't matter if you're new to product it doesn't matter if you're really experienced if you're working in a large tech company if you're working in a startup if you're working on an existing product or a brand new product it doesn't matter leave your questions and I'm going to help you out so shortly I'm going to be sharing my screen and doing a a detailed walk through of exactly what you need to include in each and every section of the product requirements document but before we get to that let's clarify what a product requirements document actually is so my definition is that a product requirements document or a PR D is a place for you to document everything that your product should do it's a way for you to communicate and collaborate with designers engineers and other stakeholders for your product you use a PR to discuss and agree and finalize the requirements for how a product should work and what it should do before you start designing it and building it if I could give you just one tip for writing a product requirements doc it is to not do it in isolation you might be the product manager you might be the product person but it's really important to get input from engineering and design and possibly even other product managers on the requirements for a given product so you can be responsible for doing the first draft making sure you get the requirements through to completion you can make sure you are coordinating with everyone communicating with everyone and you can really own the requirements but make sure you are asking relevant questions of other people of design of engineering of related product managers in other product teams make sure it is a collaborative exercise and that might also take a little bit of pressure off you from thinking that you need to write this polished document from the outset and just present it to engineering and design because that is definitely not the case now let's jump to a walkr of the template okay welcome to the product requirements document template if you have used my version from 2021 then this probably looks quite familiar to you it's just a little bit refreshed and some of the content has changed but let me give you an overview of how this works um on the left hand side here you have an outline this basically covers all of the key sections in the document and every section I believe should be included in a good product requirements document you might not know all of these things when you create a first draft but over time and especially when you finalized the requirements you should really have populated all of these things um now in this walk through I'm actually going to talk walk through a specific example of a product this is one of the items this is a piece of feedback I had on the last product requirements video that I did where people were asking if I had a completed product requirements document so I decided I will use something that a lot of us are familiar with and is talked about quite a lot today and use that as an example to really anchor us when we are going through each section so the example I'm going to be using for this requirements document template is the Tik Tok app okay so maybe if some of you are in India which a lot of my audien is you don't use Tik Tok but I'm sure you will be familiar with what it is it is the short form video social platform I will try my best to provide an example using Tik Tok for every section in this document it's not going to be in-depth it's not going to be detailed it's just going to be a brief example so you can understand what I'm talking about so starting off we want to be really clear about what this document is about so I'm going to change the product title to read Tik Tok short uh I'll just say Tik Tok app short form video social app or I'll just say social platform and I might just move this down so it just looks a bit better there we go and these are the product requirements now we have a table here which is a summary of when this document was created when we are hoping to release the requirements in this document and the people that are involved so let's say I'm creating this so let's say July 23rd 2022 and let's just call it version one um I don't have a designer or an engineering lead and let's say I'm the product manager you get the point and let's say we want to release this in December 2022 you get the point moving along we have the table of contents pretty self-explanatory remember to update the table of contents using this button here if you change or add any headings that already exist now let's focus on the first section which is the problem what is the problem that this product initiative or this product idea is going to solve everything starts with a problem you might have a great idea for a product but you need to ensure it's solving a problem for someone so hopefully you know this if you're already at the point where you are writing requirements and all you really need to do is articulate that problem problem you have will depend on your company your industry whether it's a a problem you're solving for an existing product or it's a brand new problem space and you will actually be developing a whole new product so think about that and gather research and insights from your company in order to fill in the problem section to give you an example you can talk about problems in different ways so you can talk about if it's an existing product what are the gaps in that product today talk about the limitations of it talk about the requests that customers have which prevent them from being able to do certain things um which is the second point you could also talk about how the problem you have is impacting business growth or or the value you are giving customers maybe growth of your product or product area or business has stagnated and you need to move into an entirely new area in order to keep going the business and you can also have problems that simply relate to the technical aspect of a product for example maybe it's a product that's very widely used but it's built using Legacy software and you are seeing a rapid decline in the performance and reliability of that software that is a problem that is purely technical but it has a direct impact on your customer is if it's affecting the way that they use the product how it responds its performance Etc you can also have internal problems that you're trying to solve when you are building a brand new product as much as you want to be solving problems that directly impact the End customer there could be other things like really inefficient processes manual processes technology or existing products that are extremely expensive to um store and maintain and the one I see most often in working in a larger tech company is another team needs something and that team is not able to build everything that they need themselves and so we're actually solving a customer problem for them but the internal problem we are solving is we are enabling another team to do something you get the point how much should you write about the problem I think a couple of paragraphs is sufficient one paragraph with some bullet points is also sufficient if it's an obvious and important problem to solve it shouldn't take too much explaining to make it obvious that the problem needs to be solved also if you have ways in which the problem can be measured make sure you add those things in so add metrics um data both qual qualitative and quantitative in order to measure and quantify problem so this might be we are losing x amount of of money every single year it could be it takes customers this long to do this task it could be we are experiencing this much churn a percentage of customers 20% churn because our product doesn't have this thing okay so now moving on to the solution now what is the solution to the problem at this point in the requirements doc we just want to provide a bit of an overview of what you're thinking the solution could be it doesn't have to go in depth into describing exactly what the product capabilities or feature set is but it should generally allude to the approach that you want to take to solving the problem um so let me actually add that in uh describe actually let's say describe the approach and or or the capabilities and features of the product which will solve the problem as required now the problem we might be solving for the Tik app is that there is no social platform that allows easy sharing of short form video so you can be as high level as saying you want to build let's say a mobile and desktop app that for Tik Tok um that allows people to easily share short form video that allows them to interact with each other it allows businesses to advertise on this platform and it provides users with uh an experience across all different types of devices it also allows them to create videos within the app and then share them across other platforms now what will probably happen is as you work through the detailed requirements you will get a better idea of what the solution is so you don't have to finalize the solution section right now when you're just starting the doc and you can always come back to it and you can always refine it because your solution is going to change as well as you learn more as you collaborate and discuss things with engineering and design you might end up pivoting your solution so this is just getting your mind thinking about what the solution could possibly be it is not expecting you to know exactly what the solution definitely will be okay next is use cases use cases are really important because they should directly and very clearly communicate how someone is going to use your product in order to achieve achieve something in other words what are their jobs to be done you may have heard of the jobs to be done framework and that's really how someone achieves specific tasks using a given product I've just looked up the definition of use case so it's very clear and a use case is a description of the ways a user interacts with a system or product now I have linked a jobs to be done article and you can read through this to understand how this framework works and it will give you an idea around how to actually craft the statements for your use cases I love writing now you can write your use cases in any terminology that you like but if you are struggling with it you can use the jobs to be done framework to write them in the format like this as a user right and you might want to Define like who your user is so it could be as an influencer if I'm doing something for a Tik Tok app it could be as a business if I'm advertising on the Tik Tok app it could be as a consumer if I'm just consuming the Tik Tok app but I'm just going to say as a user I want to do X Y Z now that's a really really really simple way of writing a use case it's pretty much like writing a user story and user stories are actually going to come in very handy for our specific requirement so if you actually write the use cases in this format then writing your requirement will be a little bit easier also but you can also just write your requirements in any other way so for example sometimes how I write my requirements is so for Tik Tok let's just say as a as a Creator I want to TI ToK videos with other social apps so that I can easily read distribute my content okay that's an example of a user story for Tik Tok as someone who is creating videos on the app there is no official correct format to write your use cases you can just write them in a bullet bulleted list that's actually typically what I do so don't overco complicate it just think about what your user should be able to do and write that in some kind of bullet list okay next is the value proposition and here we really want to think about the benefit the why why would someone use this what is the advantage or value or benefit that I am giving them and when you think about value you have to consider things like your competitors people will look at Value prop when they are thinking about using different products that do similar things Al so always think about why a customer would choose your particular product over a competitor's format so there is a similar format to the jobs to be done that you can use to write your value prop and that is we help user okay we help user we help user do something by doing something else so in the Tik Tok example we could say we help creators to easily create and distribute [Music] short videos by allowing them to complete the full video production process within the Tik Tok app this just an example of what the value prop might be for a Creator now this is really no different to Instagram I'm not putting a lot of thought into this this is just to to give you a more tangible example of how you might write these and so you can relate it back to a product that you already know now if you're still struggling to come up with value proposition I highly recommend completing a value proposition canvas if you watch my videos you know I'm a huge proponent of the business model canvas which is basically one page that really forces you to get your ideas down about a business in a very succinct way and it gives you little blocks on the page to help you figure out all the different things you need to think about and the value proposition canvas is very similar so I've got a link to it here and you can go through this article and read about what the value proposition canvas is and then you can also download an editable version of it I believe but it'll really help you figure out what are the features of your product what are the what is the experience your product provides and what are the benefits of it and then it helps you correlate that back to what does a customer actually need what do they want and possibly what do they don't want and then what are the other substitutes or com competitors that they might consider next is Target personas this is really who is your customer who are you going to be building this for you really need to know who you are building it for that can often Drive the direction of the product but also the experience for example someone who is an influencer or a content creator will want a slightly different experience from the Tik Tok app than someone who is just consuming content and in a similar way a business will want different tools for advertising their business and doing sponsored videos versus a Creator who's just putting videos on their own account so think about who your primary Persona is this is the person that is going to be the main beneficiary of your product and essentially who you are building for another example maybe you are building for a developer right you have some kind of product that is going to be used by developers the experience that a developer expects and requires is very different to someone who is not technical at all so think about that but as you think about what your primary Persona wants don't forget don't forget about secondary personas your primary customer might actually interact with other people and they might not be in your product as much as your primary person but but maybe they are across aspects of it or maybe they have to work with your primary Persona in order to complete a given task so don't discount secondary personas make sure you still think about them and make sure you document them but they are not your immediate or direct Focus for who this product is being built for and the experience that it Cates for should be for the primary Persona now for Tik Tok this is me making assumptions but but I would think that they actually have two personas one is the consumer and one is the creator I actually think they're both probably the primary Persona because if no one is creating content then no one can watch it and if no one's watching the content then people aren't going to create so it's almost like this weird Marketplace like you need both but I would say a secondary Persona um on the Tik Tok app is probably businesses businesses who want to is businesses and maybe even musicians and artists because there's so much music that is plugged into to the Tik Tok app okay next is goals and success criteria so what goals do you have for this product think back to the goals you first wrote down in the earlier section and consider how certain goals will help you to solve those problems you can almost flip your problem to make it a goal so for example if your problem was that you see customers churning off your product and the churn rate is currently 20% maybe the goal that you have have is you want to increase product you want to maybe the goal that you have is you want to increase increase customer retention by 20% this is something that's really measurable and I think that's the really important thing when it comes to goals so you can have those kind of goals you could also have success criteria which is you know a number of customers that are using a given product um maybe you have a certain uh youth usage volume that you would like for your product or maybe you want to achieve a certain Revenue goal with the product so think about your problems and just like flip them to think about how you could solve them and and write that as your goal um I'm going to add that in here so think about your problems and reverse them into goals IE Pro problem if a problem equals chm a goal would equal retention okay next is user experience now you're going to be doing a lot of user experience work hopefully alongside or with a designer and that's going to be a whole separate track of work but I think in the requirements document it's important to at least touch on the experience and the main thing is just link out to the other documents and design docs Concepts userflows mockups all that stuff just link out to it and anyone who is interested can go and look at that because designs and design documents are pretty extensive as as they should be but I think in the requirements document at least to start with especially if you haven't started creating any designs or initial mockups to help communicate to your designers what you Vision the experience to be just write down a bullet list just write down a bullet pointed list of what the user experience should be so thinking about user experience in the Tik Tok app obviously I'm going to call out that the mobile app experience needs to be really important across all kinds of devices I want to mention that there needs to be clear ways for people to browse videos and then create and edit videos and then there needs to be some for them to manage their account it's fairly straightforward but in terms of the user experience I would talk about how those different parts of the product would be split up and if you really don't know what the user experience looks like honestly that is fine just leave this because you're going to write your requirements you're going to have a lot of discussion and collaboration with your designers in order to use those requirements to actually design the product and you can come back to this but if you have any initial ideas on what the experience is or could be write them down here maybe even put in a little sketch or mockup that you've done yourself because this is all about communication and getting all the ideas that you have onto paper so that other people can also soundboard off your ideas and that's essent that's essentially what creates a fantastic product when everyone collaborates from the different expertise and um perspectives that they have okay next is competitor analysis now just like the user experience and design you're probably going to be doing a lot lot of competitor research probably even before you start writing the official requirements because when you have an idea or you have a problem and you're trying to come up with a solution the first thing you do is think is anyone else solving this and you're likely to come across some of your competitors who have tried to solve similar problems so chances are you've already done some research again you probably have some other place where you've documented your research analysis uh this could be in Mirror this could be in a slide this could just could be a spreadsheet if you're comparing um different things it could just be in a Google doc right just link out to your competition and I think the main thing in the product requirements stock is to one mention who the competitors are now the other now the other reason I would put competitor analysis as a section in this document without providing too much detail is because your requirement stock should ideally serve as some kind of repository right you want everything in one place different sections of a given document will um link out to other documents which have the full detail and that is fine but if I'm someone who is interested in the requirements for a particular product I'm probably going to want to understand how other people do this so just make my life easier and just link the work you've done and it also prevents people from asking you the same question over and over about whether you've looked at requirements whether you have designs for something um who your Target customer is like you're covering all of that in your requirement stock and it's the central repository for it okay next we have the key features and releases now we're really getting to what are the actual requirements and capabilities of this product so you can see basically throughout this entire document until this point we've not actually talked about functionality or features right or like the specific um or the specific product requirements and that's because there's a lot of work that goes into researching and understanding your Market your customers um your competition your problem space there's a lot of work that goes into that that kind of prefaces all of the requirements and you can split this up into different documents um but yeah I like to put it all in one because the features will make a lot more sense if someone understands all of that context as well but now we are finally getting to talking about actual functionality so this section here features and releases is a summary of the capabilities your product will have and if you have some ideas around how you might phase the releases then you can also allude to that you don't have to you could just list down the product will do all of these things so again for the Tik Tok app as an example I would say the Tik Tok mobile app could can um people can browse videos they can search for videos they can share videos they can comment on videos they can create videos edit videos in the app businesses can advertise so it's literally the functionality that you want the app to have in a high level summarized way I would put into this section and maybe if you do have some ideas around well this is what we want to release first this is what we want to release second and we want to build up these gradual these gradual releases then you can also section those out here again your releases are going to change and your features might also change as you write the detailed requirements so don't worry too much this is just a first cut it's getting the initial ideas that you have out of your brain onto paper and you can come back and refine it's a bit of a continuous cycle until you start building and even when you start building things are going to come up that you're going to have to tweak and you may end up tweaking things as you build yeah and last last but not least I've zoomed out a little bit we have the user stories and requirements so this is where we get super specific about every single feature that the given product will have all of the different user stories or jobs to be done that that feature should enable and then the details of what that jobs to be done feature and then the and then the details and requirements of exactly what that feature should have so let me talk you through this table I've made a few tweaks to this table from the 2021 version of the requirements Doc and there is a very good reason for it so the First Column we have is feature now when you're starting out building this table it can be quite overwhelming to think about well what are the user stories that I have cuz that's that's getting quite granular so just take a step back and think about your product right if it's a mobile app just visualize that app in your brain and think about the very high level things it should do so as an example if I think about any app to be honest but let's use the Tik Tok one again you're going to have to download the app and and and that I'm putting down as a feature because it's installation it's actually installation and Discovery secondly someone's probably going to have to create an account so account creation is a feature and you might think well installation is straightforward account creation is straight forward but in order to give Engineers the most detailed set of requirements you're going to have to break everything up into quite granular items so installation will probably have a number of things under it creating an account will have a number of things under it but you can kind of roll it up into that next you'll probably have a login page for the Tik Tok app you'll need to be able to create and edit a video you could probably split these features up into two I just lump them into one fifth you'll need to browse videos sixth you'll need to manage a profile and you probably will need to manage settings seven you'll have some analytics so actually let me add manage settings here um and eight let's say you'll need analytics and you could keep going you could make this as exhaustive as you want next you have the column that is the user story so think about the feature and what a user will be doing relative to that feature so when I think about installation what do I want to do as a user as a user I want to easily download and the app on my mobile device okay that's pretty straightforward and then the requirements for that could be maybe there is a separate requirement for which devices the app should be available on there might be a requirement for how upgrades happen so um as a user I want to upgrade my app when there are new features available something like that I'm kind of weing this on the spot and these aren't great examples but I hope you understand how I'm breaking things down so go through each of these and think about everything that a person might need to do now so login page you'll want to obviously be able to log in you want want to be able to retrieve your username you'll want to be able to reset your password um those are probably the main things you'll do on a login page uh number four create or let's do number five which is easy as a user you want to be able to browse videos so let's go as a user I want to search for videos using different filters okay pment for browsing videos could be as a user I want videos recommended to me that meet my I don't know preferences or something so both of these things relate to browsing videos but they're actually done very different ways one is the user actually going and and and looking for specific videos using specific criteria and filters the other one is those videos being surfaced to them but I've just categorized those both as being able to browse videos so there is no right and wrong here which I forgot to mention you can categorize these in many different ways um but this is kind of the method that helps me um okay now the next one is requirements so take each of these user stories and try to get as detailed as possible with what the person building this would and designing this would need to know and really challenge yourself to think about all of the different considerations that would go into a user being able to do this particular task right so the installation one is probably relatively straightforward but if I go through the browse videos one again or if I go through the account login right so as a user I want to create an account so that I can I don't know probably easily return to the app and have my preferences saved so the requirements for this would be one you want to allow a user to create an account using different social media profiles I'm actually going to fix this using different social media profiles social using social so allow a user to create an account using social media using existing social media accounts okay then you can specify which accounts those are you could say um it's actually these actually relate to login but you could say um user must set password you could actually phrase these in that way too so user can create account using existing social media accounts user must set password and verify email okay must a password and username so you could maybe have some validation on here to check are they actually setting a username or are they just trying to use their email address maybe you don't want them to be able to create an account without a username so you can specify the fields that are required email password and username um you could say user is sent a verification email um upon submitting a ver verification email account so things like account creation installation and login Pages these are pretty industry standard things um which is kind of why I'm using them because I can come up with these examples on the Fly and a lot of these things might already be quite known right like there are going to be pretty standard ways in which your development team goes through the installation process there's going to be pretty standard ways in which you um there are going to be pretty standard practices for what is requ IR ired when someone is creating an account um like you need to have a password for example you need to have some kind of email address so some things will be obvious but there is genuinely no harm in writing them down but it's really those features that are new and you're you're really creating them from scratch that are going to require very detailed requirements so let me go to one of those right so let's look at um browsing videos so as a user I want to search for videos using different filters us can browse videos on a dedicated page right maybe you can call this the for you page as as there is on Tik Tok um or on Instagram is the explore page then you could say [Music] um for you page has uh support keyword search and a set of filtering options okay then you can say filtering options include um and then you can go through and Define a bunch of fields that people should be able to search on and then so on and so forth so you get the point that I'm getting at but now this is something I've added but now this is something I've added to this version of the document and it's probably not something you see in a lot of requirement dogs but I find that it works really really well it helps you really formulate your thoughts and it also helps your designers and your developers and it's not possible in all circumstances but I think if you do your research it is possible so this column is called example UI now what I'm referring to here is sometimes now sometimes it's really hard to articulate exactly what a specific feature should do but it's so much easier to draw it out and and visualize it sometimes you can just scribble how a screen should look to someone and they will understand rather than having to actually write it in words now both are important and useful but they do work really well um together so I've added this column so that when you are describing your requirements for something like the for you page might the browse videos page is probably a good example if if you can show an example of what you mean it's just going to make communication with your designers and your developers so much easier and chances are you're already doing research right with competitors or generally in the market for how something like this could work so it's not a lot of additional effort for you to also provide those examples and those example designs in this document so for example what I might do um if I was building the Tik Tok app from scratch and I had this requirement I would go and look at some other social media apps and I would look at how they manage their browse videos functionality and let's say I'm trying to explain on this requirement how the filtering should work maybe I can take a snippet like a screenshot of how another app is doing filtering and paste that in the example UI just as a reference right we're not copying it's it's a reference point but it really conveys the idea and it also gives design a good idea for what works and what doesn't work and how something could be represented I like to think of the example UI column as really supplementing the written requirement um and and if you can't find something by the way that's already out there just mock up something yourself like just sketch it out um and in some cases you can leave a blank for example you might not really need to articulate in too much detail or with a UI what an account creation or login page looks like that was a pretty industry standard but again this could be a really useful tool if it's something that you are creating from scratch and then the last column is release which is self-explanatory you can write down which release you think this requirement will relate to this is not something you might know immediately um you'll probably need to find finaly your requirements and then think about what is must have what is nice to have for each release but once you do you can allocate each requirement and each story to a particular release okay now I've got this section here which is called release plan and this is optional uh and this is really just another way of presenting requirements and I'll probably actually call this requirements and requirements per release so this is just another way of representing this table right rather than starting with the feature rather than leading with the feature and then allocating a release to it maybe you have a really good handle on what each release must do and so you can just categorize your stories based on the release um You probably still worthwhile writing the feature that each story relates to um but it's really just about what works best for you for categorizing the functionality is it based just on feature because you don't know what each release will include or do you actually have a really good idea what the release will include and the problem you need to solve for customers in that first release and then you can categorize things this way okay and we're almost done so the last two sections are out of scope and questions and decision tracker these are self-explanatory be clear about what this product is not doing if there are specific things you are leaving out and you're leaving them out intentionally just mention them in here so that people aren't wondering why something is missing and then as certain questions arise or really big decisions are made just document them you don't have to document them in this document you could do it somewhere else but again I like to really have everything in one place um it can obviously make for a crazy really lengthy dock but I just prefer this to having to toggle between a million different pages and tabs so yeah just remember to document decisions that are made because you're probably going to forget why you decided to do something or not to do something and yeah that's the end of the document so hope you found this useful so that is it for this video thank you so much for watching if you did get this far I hope this video was of immense value to you if you know one other person that would benefit from learning about product requirements in depth then share this video with them leave a comment like the video subscribe for future videos that are going to also give you so much free value on your product career and just with your Tech Career in general thank you for thank you again for watching and I will see you in my next video bye [Music]