The benefits of writing a Product Requirements Document for your web development project
2nd June, 2010 by Alick
You know what it is you want to do online.
You’ve got your market sussed, done your research and you know who your competitors are. A key part of that process is planning your web design and development project in detail. No one would build a house from scratch without consulting an architect and a surveyor, but too many people will commission the build of websites without defining a plan, largely because they see skipping this stage as a cost saving. It rarely is.
The value of having a Product Requirements Document (PRD) - get like for like quotes!
Planning your website product requirements is something you do after you’ve defined your brief, or your market objectives but before you start the build. Given all the things you want to achieve with your website, the product requirements document – or PRD – describes what product features are required to deliver on those objectives. This document can then serve as a basis from which potential suppliers can quote – returning to you a proposal which details what technology, process and solutions they’ll go through to deliver on those product requirements, which in turn deliver on your wider business aims. You should then, when reviewing supplier proposals, be able to compare like with like – knowing they’ve responded to the request for the product you want built, as opposed to the product they want to build for you!
Different suppliers will suggest different, innovative ways of delivering on the PRD. Some might propose solutions you’ve not thought of before. This is fine. Just ask, ‘Does what is on offer deliver on my product requirements and thus my objectives?’
Who writes it? And what’s in a PRD?
Some web companies might propose writing this document for you – often as a chargeable stage, maybe specifying that you should perhaps use it to get comparable quotes by which you can assess the quality of their own price and solution. Or, in commissioning a project, you might decide to engage an external consultant who can help draw this up for you and then help in managing the acquisition of a supplier.
A good PRD should start of with a face to face meeting with the writer, who will note down your objectives, read through research and explore your market requirements.
The document they write should summarize these and then go on to describe:-
- the environment in which the project needs to be delivered (i.e. web and/or mobile),
- the scope of the deliverables (i.e. what’s required and what isn’t – as well as the time frame and budget of you have it)
- the different types of users that will use the website (i.e. customers, clients – not personas as such – these would have ideally been defined in your earlier research),
- the journeys those users will go through (i.e. buy a product, download a document),
- the features that will be required
- the standards to which the product will be built
You then review it, and when you’re happy that it describes the product that will meet your aims, you can then move on to finding the team that will build it for you.
If we write the PRD, we don’t have to be the company that then builds your site.
The process often works best if we don’t quote for the development stage because it means we can write the most objective document possible so that your shortlist of suppliers can all quote from the same information. At the start of the planing process you can specify if you’d like us to quote for the work once the planning documentation has been created – we’ll also let you know if we’d be interested in the work, as quite often, we’ll plan projects that exceed the resources we have available, but it’s possible, using the PRD as an effective tool, that we can move you to the next stage of helping you source the best supplier.
Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.
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Tags: prd, product requirements document, project planning, web development