Software product description document

Everyone working on the project needs to be involved in the process from the start. Keep it collaborative. It may lead to a lot of discussions early on, but it will save you time getting everyone on the same page later. There are many collaborative documentation tools that can facilitate such workflows, including Nuclino. In many cases, visual aids, such as charts and diagrams, can be more helpful in conveying your point than plain text. In Nuclino, you can embed live diagrams by simply pasting a shared link from draw.

Don't leave things out — even the things you are confident you won't forget. Ideally, it should be possible for anyone other than you to understand and implement the design as written, in your absence. As mentioned earlier, software development is a collaborative process, and feedback loops and reviews are crucial for a successful outcome. Word is a great tool that has its applications but it's also rigid and closed in nature.

Writing a design document in Word would virtually guarantee that no one will read and let alone update it. An ideal tool for writing an SDD is open, collaborative, and organized — Nuclino aims to be such a tool. Keep your design docs easily accessible to all stakeholders by keeping them in your shared drive or your internal knowledge base , making them easily discoverable and searchable.

There are no set rules about the length of a software design document. But keep in mind that the longer your document is, the more effort it would take for you to keep it up-to-date and for your readers to absorb. Keep it under five pages if you can and use clear, simple language when describing your solution to your team.

Your design will evolve, and so should your document. To keep all the stakeholders on the same page, you would want to update the document every time you make changes to the original solution or update the scope or timeline of your project. To draw the attention of the stakeholders to a particular update in Nuclino, simply -mention them and they will get an instant notification. Track the evolution of your design document and restore earlier versions if necessary using the version history.

An MRD should be created before a PRD so you can document what the customer needs and wants from your product or service before you define the requirements. Your PRD should follow a top-down approach that starts with the overall vision of what you want to accomplish. It should then tie product goals and initiatives with the features required to achieve that vision. A well-defined PRD also includes details about how the end user will interact with the functionality and what it will look like.

Many people associate PRDs with the waterfall development methodology. In waterfall, requirements are defined in the first phase of the project and provide a detailed description of what will be built. In recent years, agile development has shifted organizations towards using a more adaptive planning approach. This means requirements are continuously added to the backlog and prioritized based on importance. No matter if you follow waterfall or agile methodologies, a PRD can be useful — helping to get everyone aligned around the key capabilities that will be delivered in a new product or release.

This allows engineering, design, support, sales, and marketing teams to effectively collaborate and deliver a Complete Product Experience that delights customers.

PRDs should be clear and succinct. Today, many teams use purpose-built product management software to collaborate on a PRD and then define product work.

Collaborating in real time and connecting your PRD to detailed work at the feature level saves you time from writing a new document for each release. If you are not yet ready to use a web-based tool to collaborate on your product plans, this guide provides a useful template to help you write a PRD. Product requirements documents PRDs are often confused with market requirements documents MRDs , but they are different. MRDs are documents that describe the size of your market, the types of customers you will target, and competitors in your space.

PRDs describe how your product will actually be built. An MRD should be created before you write a PRD so you can document what the customer needs and wants from your product or service before you define the requirements. A product requirements document PRD template is a great way to capture information about your product requirements in one place — so everyone understands how the new features will solve customer problems and move the product strategy forward.

It can be helpful to see an example of a PRD if you have not created one before. Download a PRD template here, with space within to capture each of the six components for your product:.

The objective section of a PRD explains the customer problem you are solving and how it relates to your vision , goals, and initiatives. This establishes the high-level purpose for what you want to accomplish and who your product is for. It also keeps the broader product team focused on building features that delight your customers — so you can deliver a Minimum Lovable Product MLP.

Use the release section of the PRD to outline what will be delivered and when. This helps internal teams understand the scope and timeline of the release so they can plan their work. Capture key milestones and dependencies to keep everyone on track. The next step is to define each feature or user story that will be delivered in the release. This section of the PRD is where you explain exactly what needs to be built so the development team can determine how best to implement it.

Use this template to document the product requirements for each feature. Include visual wireframes and mockups in your PRD to show what the feature will look like and where it fits on the overall sitemap or page. This helps the development team understand exactly what you are envisioning and how the functionality should be implemented.

Thinking about a feature from the perspective of what the user is trying to accomplish helps the team create a better overall experience in the development process. Wireframes are a great way to model how the user will interact with the functionality.

Visualizing the customer journey in this way helps you identify ways to improve the overall experience and reduces misunderstandings about how features should work.

It is important to establish upfront how you will measure the success of your features. Create a hypothesis about the impact you think a feature will have so you can assess whether it achieves the desired results. Here is a simple template you can use to develop a hypothesis for each feature in your PRD:. Include an overall success metric to evaluate whether or not your hypothesis was correct.

For example, here is a hypothesis for a feature in our demo product, Fredwin Cycling. We believe that supporting multiple languages will increase customer acquisition in international markets by 30 percent. Understanding customer behavior and what is working is key to building a product that delights your users.

Work with engineering to put feature tracking in place in your application. This enables you to monitor key performance indicators so you can analyze how users are engaging with features and where further improvements might be needed.

Here is a template for capturing the performance indicators for each feature. It can be helpful to include high-level information about future roadmap plans for your product in the PRD. Include any relevant information that helps the team understand how the product may evolve over time. Cross-team collaboration is essential to building great products. Capturing your product requirements in one place helps everyone work more efficiently and deliver what customers need.

As you write your PRD, remember that the purpose of the document is to get everyone aligned so that they can understand how the product or feature works. Share the PRD with business and technical teams who help build, launch, and market your product so you can move forward in the same direction.

Product management Templates Planning templates Product requirements document template. What should a product requirements document PRD template contain? There will always be details that neither of you had considered, and both you and the client will, while looking at the intermediate results, encounter new ideas, design changes, unexpected design flaws, and unworkable suggestions.

The design will evolve, and the changes should be captured in your document. Even then, I created a design document with detailed specifications, and adjusted it as necessary.

Above all, keep in touch. At least several times a week, contact your client, report on your progress, ask for clarification, and make certain that you share identical visions.

As a litmus test for your communication, try and ensure that you and your client give the same answers to these three questions:. SDD stands for software design document or software design description. A functional design document describes a software product's capabilities, appearance, and functions it needs to ultimately perform. Design documents are also referred to as functional specifications or functional specifications documents FSDs , or functional requirements specifications.

A high-level design document HLDD describes the architecture used in the development of a particular software product. It usually includes a diagram that depicts the envisioned structure of the software system. Since this is a high-level document, non-technical language is often used. The software design document SDD typically describes a software product's data design, architecture design, interface design, and procedural design.

Subscription implies consent to our privacy policy. Thank you! Check out your inbox to confirm your invite. Engineering All Blogs Icon Chevron. Filter by. View all results. Author Christopher J Fox. From your humble beginnings, perhaps working as a tester, you've progressed to a team developer, then a senior developer, and now you've made another leap, the biggest of them all, to working directly with clients.

You can't work by getting a few sentences of terse description over Skype and saying "See you in three months when I'm done.

But these illustrations say nothing about animations, control states, or even what actions to perform when a button is pressed.