| name | product-prd |
| description | Write or critique a lean product brief, PRD, or PR/FAQ that frames the customer, outcome, evidence, risks, constraints, measures, and open decisions before implementation detail. Use when requirements are solution-heavy, scope is unclear, or a team needs an executable product definition. |
Product PRD
Create the smallest product definition that aligns a cross-functional team and exposes unresolved decisions. Do not use document length as a proxy for rigor.
Choose the artifact
- Use a one-page product brief for early discovery or a reversible bet.
- Use a PR/FAQ when customer value and narrative clarity are the main uncertainty.
- Use a lean PRD when engineering, design, analytics, operations, or policy need durable shared constraints and acceptance signals.
Workflow
- Name the decision owner, target customer, triggering situation, and desired outcome.
- Summarize problem evidence and current alternatives.
- Explain the value mechanism and strategic fit.
- State assumptions and assess value, usability, feasibility, and viability risks.
- Define in-scope behavior, constraints, and explicit non-goals without prematurely specifying every interaction.
- Describe the end-to-end customer journey, including failure, recovery, support, and exit paths.
- Define success, guardrail, instrumentation, rollout, and decision thresholds.
- Capture dependencies, unresolved questions, and owner for each.
- Add a decision log and change policy so later learning is traceable.
Output contract
Return:
- Summary and decision
- Customer, situation, problem, and evidence
- Outcome and strategic rationale
- Proposed approach and alternatives
- Scope, non-goals, and constraints
- Four-risk assessment
- Journey and failure handling
- Metrics, instrumentation, rollout, dependencies, and open decisions
Quality gate
- Evidence and assumptions are visibly different.
- The artifact explains why before what.
- Non-goals constrain scope.
- Acceptance is behavioral and measurable where possible.
- Failure and operational paths are included.
- Unknowns have owners and resolution dates.
Avoid
- A giant feature specification before discovery
- Requirements without a target outcome
- “User-friendly,” “fast,” or “accurate” without thresholds
- Hiding disagreements in vague prose
- Treating document approval as product validation
Source grounding
Operational synthesis informed by product discovery, four-risk, and prototype principles in Inspired, outcome orientation in Escaping the Build Trap, and strategy coherence in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. PR/FAQ use is framework-informed rather than a faithful distillation of Working Backwards.
