I had written technical blogs that thousands of people read. I had authored reference architectures that guided enterprise deployments. I had built solution briefs, enablement decks, and training programs that scaled across entire regions. I was no stranger to putting complex ideas on paper.
And yet, sitting in front of a blank document titled “Product Requirements Document,” I felt like I had never written anything in my life.
The PRD was not harder because the content was more complex. It was harder because the stakes were different. A blog post informs. A reference architecture guides. A PRD commits. It is the document that tells an entire engineering team what to build, why to build it, and how success will be measured. Get it wrong, and you do not just confuse readers. You waste months of engineering effort.
This is the story of my first PRD, everything I got wrong, and the three lessons that I carry with me to this day.
The Blank Page Problem
My first PRD was for a feature within Pure1’s analytics capabilities. I will spare you the specifics, but the challenge was straightforward enough: define a new capability that would give customers better visibility into their environment. I had spent weeks in discovery. I had talked to customers. I had reviewed competitive offerings. I understood the problem deeply.
So I sat down and started writing. And immediately fell into the trap that every engineer-turned-PM falls into.
I wrote an implementation spec disguised as a PRD.
The document was full of “how.” How the data pipeline should work. How the UI components should render. How the API should be structured. It read like something an engineer would hand to another engineer, because that is exactly what I knew how to write. I had spent years writing technical documentation where the value was in the precision of the implementation details.
But a PRD is not an implementation spec. A PRD describes the “what” and the “why.” It defines the problem, the user, the desired outcome, and the constraints. It leaves the “how” to the people who are better equipped to figure it out: the engineers and designers.
My first reviewer pointed this out gently but clearly. “Adam, this is really thorough. But I cannot tell what problem we are solving. Can you rewrite the first two pages?”
Those first two pages were the ones I had been most proud of.
Rewriting and Rethinking
The rewrite forced me to confront something uncomfortable: I had been using technical detail as a safety blanket. When you come from an engineering background, specificity feels like rigor. The more precise you are, the more credible you feel. But in a PRD, over-specifying the solution actually undermines the document. It constrains the team before they have had a chance to explore. It signals that you do not trust them to figure out the implementation. And it buries the most important information, the problem and the user, under layers of technical scaffolding.
The second draft looked nothing like the first. I led with the customer problem. I described the persona, the pain point, and the business context. I defined what success looked like from the user’s perspective, not from a system architecture perspective. I included constraints and dependencies, but I framed them as guardrails rather than instructions.
It was shorter. It was clearer. And it was significantly harder to write.
Three Lessons I Now Teach Others
Today, when I mentor other PMs on writing PRDs, there are three principles I always come back to. These are not things I read in a book. They are things I learned by getting it wrong first.
1. PRDs Are Living Documents
My first PRD was written as if it were a contract. Every requirement was locked down. Every acceptance criterion was final. I treated it like a technical specification that, once signed off, should never change.
That is not how products work.
Requirements evolve as the team learns more. Customer feedback during development can reshape priorities. Technical discoveries can open new possibilities or close existing ones. A PRD that cannot accommodate change is a PRD that becomes irrelevant by the time the feature ships.
I now treat PRDs as living artifacts. They have a version history. They have open questions that get resolved over time. They have sections that are explicitly marked as “draft” or “needs validation.” The document grows and sharpens alongside the product it describes.
2. A Good PRD Is Precise and Concise, Yet Flexible
This is the hardest balance to strike. You need enough detail to align the team and reduce ambiguity, but not so much that you eliminate room for creative problem-solving. You need clear success criteria, but not criteria so rigid that they become a checkbox exercise rather than a measure of real impact.
The way I think about it now: a PRD should be precise about the problem and the outcome, and flexible about the path between them. Define what “done” looks like from the customer’s perspective. Define the constraints that are truly non-negotiable. Then give your team the space to find the best way there.
The first draft of my first PRD had thirty-seven bullet points under “Requirements.” The final version had twelve. Every one of those twelve was sharper, more meaningful, and more actionable than any of the original thirty-seven.
3. PRDs Are Excellent Communication Tools
This was the lesson that surprised me the most. I initially thought of the PRD as a document for engineering. A set of instructions to hand off and walk away from. In reality, the PRD is the single most important communication artifact a PM produces.
It aligns engineering, design, and QA on what we are building. It gives leadership visibility into the strategic rationale. It serves as a reference point when scope discussions happen mid-sprint. It is the document you come back to when someone asks, “Wait, why are we doing this again?”
Writing a technical blog and writing a PRD are both acts of communication, but the audience and the stakes are fundamentally different. A blog post reaches readers who chose to be there. A PRD reaches stakeholders whose time, effort, and careers are tied to what it says. That realization changed how seriously I took every sentence.
The Bridge Between Worlds
Looking back, the PRD became something I did not expect: a bridge. Not just between product and engineering, but between my old identity and my new one.
As an engineer, I communicated through architecture diagrams, code, and technical documentation. As a PM, I needed to communicate through problem statements, user stories, and business cases. The PRD was where those two worlds met. It required technical understanding to write credibly, but product thinking to write effectively.
My engineering background did not make writing PRDs easier. But it did make the PRDs better, once I learned to use that background as context rather than content. Knowing how systems work helped me write constraints that were realistic. Understanding data pipelines helped me ask the right questions about feasibility. Having built things myself helped me respect the team’s need for autonomy in the “how.”
The trick was learning when to deploy that technical knowledge and when to hold it back. Sound familiar? It is the same lesson from the last post. Apparently, Product Management is just one long exercise in learning when to hold back.
Advice for Your First PRD
If you are about to write your first PRD, here is what I wish someone had told me:
Start with one paragraph. Before you write anything else, write a single paragraph that describes the problem, who has it, and why it matters now. If that paragraph does not make sense on its own, you are not ready to write the rest of the document.
Show it to someone outside your team. If a PM or engineer from a different product area cannot understand your PRD, it is not clear enough. The best PRDs are accessible to anyone in the organization, not just the people building the feature.
Do not confuse thoroughness with quality. A long PRD is not a good PRD. A clear PRD is a good PRD. Every section should earn its place. If a paragraph does not help the reader understand the problem, the solution, or the success criteria, cut it.
Embrace the discomfort. Your first PRD will not be great. That is fine. The document is a living thing, and so is your ability to write one. The second will be better. The tenth will feel natural. The twentieth will be something you are genuinely proud of.
I am somewhere around my twentieth now. And I can tell you with confidence: I still rewrite the first two pages.
Next up: How I Turned an Idea into a Product: 0 to 1, in 3 Months
comments powered by Disqus