17 April 2025
Design Practice

Hacking Your Product Requirement Documents to Encourage Better Design

Most product requirement documents (PRDs) are boring, transactional, and—let’s be honest—kind of useless. They tend to be a simple feature request with a rough deadline, putting all the thinking and risk on the product and design teams.

But what if your PRD could do more?

What if, instead of just collecting requests, it forced better thinking, set up design for success, and helped teams make smarter decisions?

By tweaking the way you structure PRDs, you can shift the conversation from “What do you want?” to “Why does this matter?”—leading to better product outcomes and stronger alignment between teams.

1. Start with Impact, Not Features

Most feature requests focus on what someone wants, but they rarely explain why. Instead of just asking for a description of the feature, your PRD should force requesters to answer:

  • What problem are we solving?

  • What metric will this impact?

  • What does success look like?

If a stakeholder can’t articulate how this moves the needle, it’s a signal that the idea needs more thought. This also helps product and design teams prioritize work based on impact rather than loudest voice.

2. Make People Consider the Trade-Offs

Not all good ideas are worth building. Some are incredibly expensive in terms of time and resources but have little payoff. Your PRD should include:

  • What’s the expected effort from design, engineering, and other teams?

  • What are we not doing if we say yes to this?

Forcing requesters to think about cost vs. value helps separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves. It also gives design and product teams more leverage to push back on low-value, high-effort work.

3. Require a Confidence Level

Every product team has seen a request come in with zero validation. Instead of assuming all ideas are equally viable, your PRD should ask:

  • How confident are you in this request?

  • What evidence do you have?

You can provide a simple scale:

  • Hunch – Based on intuition but hasn’t been tested.

  • Expert Recommendation – Backed by best practices or internal expertise.

  • Data-Backed – Supported by qualitative or quantitative research.

This forces stakeholders to acknowledge how much (or how little) confidence they have in their idea. It also opens the door for research as a service—if confidence is low, the design team can run experiments or user research before committing resources.

Bonus Tip: Quantify the Above

A lot of teams will run some kind of ICE or RICE prioritisation exercise in order to decide what to build next. What if your feature requests all came with some of that thinking backed in? Here's the impact, confidence and effort expect to see (out of 10). This works even more if you explain that a hunch automatically has a confidence level of 1 or 2, an expert recommendation has a confidence level up to 3 or 4, while only a data or research backed concept can be given a 5 or above? Suddenly there's lots of reasons for your executives to come to you with at least some justification in hand.

Turn PRDs Into Strategic Tools, Not Paperwork

A good PRD isn’t just a formality—it’s a forcing function for better decision-making. By making small changes to the questions you ask, you can:

  • Encourage better thinking from stakeholders.

  • Ensure design is solving meaningful problems.

  • Create alignment across teams before work even begins.

Your PRD should do more than collect requests—it should shape the way your team builds. By hacking the format, you can turn it from a bureaucratic checklist into a powerful tool for better design and product decisions.