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A product requirements document (PRD) is used in product marketing to plan and execute new products. A PRD is often created after a marketing requirements document (MRD) has been written and been given approval by management, and is usually written before (or at least concurrently with) a technical requirements document. It is designed to allow people within a company to understand what a product should do and how it should work. PRDs are most frequently written for software products, but can be used for any type of product.

Typical components of a software product requirements document are:

• Title & author Information
• Purpose and scope, from both a technical and business perspective
• Stakeholder identification
• Market assessment and target demographics
• Product overview and use cases
• Requirements, including
  • functional requirements (e.g. what a product should do)
  • usability requirements
  • technical requirements (e.g. security, network, platform, integration, client)
  • environmental requirements
  • support requirements
  • interaction requirements (e.g. how the software should work with other systems)
• Constraints
• Workflow plans, timelines and milestones
• Evaluation plan and performance metrics

Not all PRDs have all of these components. In particular, PRDs for other types of products (manufactured goods, etc.) will eliminate the software-specific elements from the list above, and may add in additional elements that pertain to their domain, e.g. manufacturing requirements.

A PRD sometimes serves as a marketing requirements document as well, particularly if the product in small or uncomplicated.

• Marketing requirements document
• Requirements management

• Joel on Software: Painless Functional Specifications - Written in 2000, one of the seminal articles on writing software requirements docs
• StartupCTO: Writing Good Functional Requirements
• StartupCTO: Software Requirements Template (MS Word)
• Process Impact: SRS Template - (MS Word)