What is a PRD? And Why Most of Them Fail

A PRD — product requirements document — defines what you're building and why. If you're looking up the meaning of PRD, that's the textbook answer. It's the bridge between customer problems and shipped software.

Most PRDs are opinion documents dressed up as strategy. A PM writes what they think should be built, disconnected from the customer conversations that inspired the idea. Stakeholders debate the opinions. Engineers build whatever survives the meeting. Nobody goes back to check if the requirements actually traced to user evidence.

We build them differently.

Why most PRDs are broken

PMs have better tools than ever — Notion, Fathom, Linear, Granola. But more tools means more signal scattered across more places. Customer interviews live in one tool, feedback in another, support tickets in a third. By the time a PM sits down to write a PRD, the evidence is fragmented and synthesis happens from memory. Industry research consistently finds that 70-85% of software rework costs trace back to poor requirements.

Engineers skim for their section. Designers look at the mocks. The customer evidence that justified every decision never makes it into the document.

The result: documents that satisfy a process but inform no decisions.

"I spent two weeks writing a PRD. In the review meeting, the first question was 'so what are we actually building?'" — PM at a Series B startup, during a user interview

PRD theater has three symptoms:

• Opinion-driven. Requirements come from the PM's head, not from customer evidence. When someone asks "why P0?", the answer is gut feeling.
• Too long. Anything over 1200 words loses its audience. The document exists to satisfy a process, not to inform decisions.
• Human-only. Written for stakeholders to debate, not for anyone — or anything — to execute.

What a PRD should actually contain

A good PRD answers seven questions in under 1200 words. Every sentence earns its place.

1. Overview

Two to three sentences. What we're building and why it matters. Someone skimming gets the full picture here and nowhere else.

2. Problem

Lead with customer evidence. Not "users struggle with X" — actual quotes, actual data. "3 of 5 interviewees described copy-pasting data between tools as their biggest daily frustration."

The problem section is where most PRDs fail. If you can't point to specific customer evidence, you're guessing.

3. Goals

Two to four outcomes — not outputs. Each with a success metric grounded in evidence and a counter-metric to prevent gaming.

• Bad: "Increase adoption by 20%" (invented number)
• Good: "Reduce PRD review cycle from 3-4 days to under 1 day" (based on what users actually reported)

4. User stories

Three to five maximum. Define users narrowly: "Series A founders doing PM work before their first PM hire" — not "product managers."

5. Requirements

Organized by priority:

• P0 (Must ship): 3-5 maximum. Every P0 includes an inline evidence citation — "4 of 6 users reported..." or a direct customer quote. If you have more than 5 P0s, you haven't prioritized.
• P1 (Should ship): High value. Users notice if missing.
• P2 (Nice to have): Fast-follow candidates.

Each requirement gets 2-4 machine-verifiable acceptance criteria. Not "should be fast" — "page loads in under 2 seconds on 3G."

6. Non-goals

What you're explicitly not building, and why. One line each. This is the section that prevents scope creep.

7. Open questions

Unresolved items with a default recommendation, who decides, and by when. Don't let open questions block the document — state your best guess and move forward.

The Evidence Gap

The single biggest upgrade you can make to your PRD process: trace every P0 requirement to customer evidence.

This means:

• Import your sources. Customer interviews, support tickets, feedback surveys, NPS responses — get it all in one place.
• Extract insights. Pull out specific pain points, feature requests, and quotes. Tag them. Deduplicate across sources.
• Weight by frequency. A pain point mentioned by 5 different customers is stronger evidence than one mentioned by 1. Use mention counts to inform priority.
• Flag assumptions. Any requirement with weak evidence (one mention, low confidence) gets flagged explicitly. "Assumption: most teams have fewer than 10 members (based on 2 of 6 interviews)."

When every requirement traces to evidence, PRD reviews stop being opinion debates and start being prioritization discussions.

Why PRDs need to be agent-ready in 2026

Here's what's changed since 2024: AI coding agents — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex — now ship features directly from PRDs. "Agent-ready" means humans review it in 3 minutes and agents execute it without follow-up questions. The PRD isn't just a communication document anymore. It's an executable spec.

This changes what "good" looks like:

• Bullets over prose. Agents parse structured lists better than paragraphs.
• Never use markdown tables. They render poorly in editors and are hard for agents to parse.
• Machine-verifiable acceptance criteria. "User can upload CSV files up to 50MB" — not "support large file uploads."
• What and why, never how. Agents have full repo context. They decide implementation. Your job is to define the outcome.

A PRD structured this way does double duty: humans scan it in 3 minutes, and coding agents execute it directly.

Start with evidence, not a blank page

The biggest friction in writing PRDs isn't the format — it's the gap between scattered customer data and structured requirements. Your interviews are in Google Drive. Feedback is in spreadsheets. Support tickets are in Zendesk.

AgentPRD closes that gap. Here's how it works. Import your evidence, extract insights with AI, and generate PRDs where every requirement cites real customer voice. The result is a PRD that's both evidence-backed and agent-ready.

But even without a tool: before your next PRD, open your last five customer interviews. Pull out the pain points. Count how many sources mention each one. Let that — not your gut — drive your P0s.

If you use Claude Code or Cursor for PM work, we open-sourced a PRD writing skill that encodes this framework directly into your agent.

Evidence in, requirements out, agents ship.

FAQ

What does PRD stand for?

Product requirements document — a document that defines what to build, why to build it, and how to know it's done.

How long should a PRD be?

Under 1200 words. Anything longer loses its audience — both human and agent.

What's the difference between a PRD and a spec?

A PRD defines what to build and why. A spec defines how to build it. With coding agents, the spec is increasingly generated — the PRD is what matters.