Few artifacts in product management are as debated as the Product Requirements Document (PRD). Once a cornerstone of software development, the PRD has been dismissed by many as a relic of the waterfall era. Agile evangelists often claimed that documentation slowed teams down, stifled creativity, and created rigid contracts rather than flexible collaboration.
Yet the pendulum has swung too far. In many organizations, the absence of structured requirements has led to chaos: misaligned expectations, duplicated effort, and wasted development cycles. The truth lies between extremes. The PRD is not obsolete, but it must be modernized to support how empowered teams work today.
The Problem with Traditional PRDs
In their original form, PRDs embodied the Architect mindset: meticulous, detailed, and designed for predictability. They outlined exhaustive feature lists, technical specifications, and user flows long before teams wrote code.
The strength of this approach was alignment—everyone could point to the same document. But the weaknesses were just as obvious:
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Assumptions ossified into requirements before testing.
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Discovery was separated from delivery, creating rework.
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Teams treated the PRD as a contract, not a learning tool.
Traditional PRDs worked in environments where change was slow and costly. In today’s complex markets, they often create more inertia than clarity.
The Agile Pendulum
Agile pushed back hard against this rigidity. Inspired by the Agile Manifesto’s call for “working software over comprehensive documentation,” many organizations eliminated requirements documents entirely.
The intent was noble—faster cycles, more collaboration, tighter feedback loops. But the result was often Agile theater: teams running sprints and ceremonies without a shared understanding of what problem they were solving. Features shipped, but outcomes were unclear.
The lesson is clear: agility is not the absence of documentation. It is the presence of living artifacts that evolve with learning.
The Modernized PRD
A modern PRD is not a static spec. It is a living document that captures what the team knows now, what assumptions remain, and what success looks like. Strong modern PRDs share several principles:
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Problem-first — Start with the customer problem or opportunity, not a feature list.
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Explicit assumptions — Document what you believe and plan to test.
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Discovery-informed — Include learnings from customer research, prototyping, and testing.
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Outcome-oriented — Define success in terms of measurable impact, not outputs.
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Team-empowered — Frame what needs solving, leaving the “how” to cross-functional teams.
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Living artifact — Update continuously as discovery progresses and context shifts.
This shift makes the PRD a tool for learning, not just alignment. It becomes a record of reasoning that helps teams move faster, not slower.
The Emerging Role of AI
AI is accelerating the modernization of PRDs in two important ways.
Research and Synthesis
AI tools can process large volumes of customer feedback, survey results, or support tickets, surfacing themes that inform problem statements and assumptions. They can also highlight contradictions or gaps in reasoning, reducing blind spots.
Vibe-Coding and Prototyping
Perhaps the most exciting development is AI-assisted prototyping, sometimes called “vibe coding.” Instead of writing static descriptions of user flows, teams can generate interactive prototypes in minutes from plain language prompts. This allows teams to test ideas faster, visualize requirements more clearly, and bring stakeholders into the discovery process earlier.
Traditional documents remain useful for alignment, but AI-driven prototyping adds a new layer of speed and fidelity. Where PRDs once described intent, AI prototypes now show it. The combination is powerful: documents ground the strategy, while prototypes accelerate learning.
Pitfalls to Guard Against
Even with modernization, PRDs carry risks. Three traps to avoid:
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Analysis paralysis: Writing endlessly instead of building. Guard against by treating PRDs as lightweight and evolving.
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Rigid rejection: Assuming PRDs are inherently anti-Agile. The real question is whether they serve outcomes.
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Doc aversion: Abandoning documentation entirely in the name of speed. Lack of clarity often creates hidden delays later.
The right balance is intentional documentation: enough to align and learn, not so much that it slows discovery.
Conclusion: PRD as Catalyst for Value
The PRD is not dead. But it is no longer a monolithic spec handed down from product managers to engineers. Instead, it is a catalyst for conversation, alignment, and discovery.
Modern PRDs define problems, surface assumptions, and capture evolving context. AI enhances this by accelerating research and enabling lightweight prototyping that makes requirements tangible.
In this way, the PRD returns to its true purpose: helping teams focus on outcomes, not outputs. A modernized PRD doesn’t constrain agility—it enables it.