Product Requirements Document

“We actually have a saying on the team of evals are the new PRDs. Cause in order to deliver that user value it's not that exact artifact that people used to write in the last like one to two decades. It's a new way of working.”

“So when we do have a model, we actually, for every model, we do have a PRD. Less necessarily for our researchers, but more for our growing product surfaces, for our engineering teams, for our stakeholders like legal and safety and others as just a source of tr…”

“Like you've seen many product leaders say PRDs are dead. And I actually don't believe this at all.”

“I think as a team, we've gotten pretty, I think, high conviction that in a world of so much noise, like crisp written clarity is more important than ever.”

“I think the first 10% of every project are now free. That's how I would describe it. So there is no point for most things to, for example, write a, I don't know. I, the thing is, has changed. I've never really been great at this, but like, there's no point in …”

“For features that are like particularly ambiguous, it does help to write out just a one pager on what the goals are what the delightful use cases are, what the failure modes currently are that we need to fix. And there are occasionally some projects, especiall…”

“Probably 70, 70%, maybe 6070, 80% of what we ship does not have a PRD.”

“By and large, I think PIDs are just outdated at this point. And you can just kick things off with a good team without, without needing to do that sort of thing.”

“I think takes like PRDs are dead or software is dead is like really dumb. I find it a little insufferable if I'm being spicy, because I still think what matters is understanding users, understanding business and economic dynamics, understanding Strategy and wh…”

“Can we just get some bullet points and, like, make a decision here versus, you know, it's some eighty-page PRD, which I just feel like is kind of, like, pretty outdated at this point. And at that point, I'd much rather just get, like, a V-zero or Figma make pr…”

“Good product managers, I think, are not compensated for writing good PRDs. They're compensated, again, for good judgment, right? Somebody else can do the writing. You, as somebody who directs and builds this product, you need to know, again, what, what's gonna…”

“So you start off with writing a PRD and a PRD thankfully is something that agents are really good at.”

“These two steps, writing a PRD and converting them to user stories, this is where you should spend a huge amount of time. Like you should spend an hour on this, right? It's very, very, very important that you get your PRD right, and that your user stories are …”

“I've had some guests on the podcast recently who've been saying evals are the new PRDs. And if you look at this is exactly what this is like. Product managers, product teams, right? Here's what the product should be. Here's all the requirements. Here's like th…”

“And if we think about the model as the product, then the eval is the PRD. And so many people have been sort of just like, you know, vibe spending on AI without actually writing the PRD of what do they want to implement and how do they measure that it's going t…”

“We started, like, essentially not doing, like, PRDs, like, product requirements documents. You know, classic PM thing. You write, like, five pages, like, my product does that, et cetera. And, you know, PMs have been basically VibeCoding prototypes.”

“Articulating it in some doc, like, it becomes a one pager instead of a 20 pager.”

“I think if you, what I've noticed is if you don't create a PRD, the output ends up being worse, like very diluted. So what's cool about the PRD is you can kind of like drip feed context and because of that, because of how tight the drip feeding is, you end up …”

“Crafting is really important when you're working in product, because if you're sitting down and you're writing a vision doc or you're writing a PRD, and if you don't pay attention to the words you use and you're not intentional about it, those have downstream …”

“I also think that the best engineers are the ones who actually don't need to start with a PRD. They can have a whiteboarding session with a PM, with a designer. They should have just an equal seat at the table in terms of what we are going to build. And then t…”

“In this day and age, if you're not prototyping and building to see what you want to build, I think you're doing it wrong. I call it the prompt steps of the new PRDs, right? Like, I really insist on folks saying, if you're building new projects, new features, o…”

“I actually always say prototype before the PRD, whenever you have an idea, whether it's engineers, designers, PMs, whatever, you should do the prototype before, because you're not going to really know how to build the product or what the exact UX should be, pa…”

“It's not like something you can just schedule 30 minutes for in the middle of your day of packed OKR reviews and run on ones and meetings... Like to me, it's still insane. Like how many product managers, leaders of all kinds, right. Just run the schedule of li…”

“I explicitly do not mean read a bunch of other PM artifacts. Like you're not gonna become a better writer by reading PRDs or, you know, whatever it is. Or support articles. It needs to be Writing that compels”

“I don't think, especially when you're starting off, that's a very, very good Think even when you are mid senior, I don't think that's a very, very good thing. You have to have to be able to produce these artifacts, which are product artifacts. Even if there ar…”

“If I could put all the research into BARD or ChatGPT, and it could spit out a PRD, Then you haven't done your job.”

“You're, in language models, your eval is your prior product requirements document. It's a probabilistic based system, and so the way you construct what you will evaluate it against effectively dictates what the product is that's going to be built.”

“If you structure it correctly, the most important section, in my opinion, in the document is this the first part, which is like, what is the background and context? What is the problem? Why does it matter? And why does it matter now? And if you get those thing…”

“A picture tells a thousand words, and a prototype tells, you know, saves a thousand meetings.”

“It's not about solutions. It's not about how you can solve them, but it's more about what and why you are solving that problem.”

“So, you know, with all the talk about how important it is to write as a product leader, I think at the end of the day, most people are never going to read your PRD. Most people are not actually going to review your, you know, 20 page roadmap, no matter how wel…”

“And it's not like a product requirements document that's 20 pages. It's like a two pager just explaining what we're doing and why. And that context we usually throw into Google docs or a wiki or something like that, link them all together so that you can go fr…”