Archive for April, 2008

MRD versus PRD

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

Put very simply, MRD (Market Requirements Document) describes the opportunity or the market need, and PRD (Product Requirements Document) describes a product that addresses that opportunity or need.

The purpose of PRD is to clearly articulate the product’s purpose, features, functionality, and behavior. The product team will use this specification to actually build and test the product, so it needs to be complete enough to provide them the information they need to do their jobs.

Working with many Startups, I have seen a common pattern of undermining PRD importance.
Some organizations perceive such up-front research as too expensive or slow, or believe they already have enough understanding of customers’ needs to start building the product before proper requirement gathering.

However, according to studies, poor requirements management attributed to 71% of software projects that fail and fixing mistakes made at requirements elicitation stage accounts for 75% of all rework costs.

Eventually projects were more likely to “run away” (take 80% longer than expected, deliver a product 30% less functional than desired, or cost more than 160% of the original budget).