Is the Product Manager a PRD producing machine👨‍💻?

It is often misconstrued that PM's role was to feed the engineering team, delivering tons of product requirement documents ( PRDs ) that would ensure that developers are occupied. This would help to showcase that product & engineering team is super-efficient in delivering lines of code but not at par in delivering consistent business value.

In fact, in order to hold PMs accountable for outcomes, organizations resort to pure productivity metrics. In such organizations, PMs are assigned a quota for “ No. of PRDs written per month/quarter “. Consider this a 🚩🚩🚩🚩.

As a result, such PMs will work excruciatingly long hours to deliver huge PRDs for features that won’t deliver the expected value to businesses or users.

How to address this scenario?

In order to tackle this scenario and ensure real productivity is captured for the PMs, one should ask the below outcome-oriented questions before starting to write a PRD :

1. Will this feature deliver value to users & grow revenue?
2. Does the list of assumptions about users hold true in reality?
3. Will this feature help in moving the key organization OKRs?
4. Is this feature going to weigh down the user experience?
5. How big is the impact on the trailing internal metrics?
6. Is the feature result of extensive user-driven insights? It should ideally collate the insights from vocal and nonvocal users.
7. Is the feature contributing heavily to the product strategy of the organization?

Imagine the impact it would make if you start asking all these questions proactively. It would help you to tap the engineering potential & focus on creative solutions.

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Do check out exclusive Product Management resources 👇

• The Ultimate List of 100+ Product Management tools 🛠https://rohitverma.gumroad.com/l/PM-tools
• The Ultimate List of Product Management Frameworks ⚙️
  https://rohitverma.gumroad.com/l/PM-frameworks
• The most exhaustive OKRs notion template 📔https://rohitverma.gumroad.com/l/OKR-Template