A Product Brief summarizes the scope, goals, and direction of a product, major initiative, or a feature. Product briefs help you organize your ideas, figure out your approach, and guide your team through the full development process. The brief helps you communicate the problem and solution to others involved in the project. It can also help the product team align on what they want.
Product Briefs answer five essential questions about the product, initiative, or feature:
The Product Brief is a tremendous help for Product and Engineering to communicate effectively and accurately over the course of the development.
However, the Product Brief isn’t just for the product and engineering teams. Documenting requirements in a Product Brief make it easier for other teams to find value by leveraging this document for their needs as well .
For example:
When you write the Product Brief during the inception of the product’s requirements, you are aiding your entire organization to operate more efficiently across the board.
Most importantly, Product Briefs, put the desired requirements down in writing. Why is this important?
Verbal conversations offers immediate feedback and it’s very helpful when a team is discussing why a feature is important for the team to build into the product. We want to encourage as much verbal communication as possible when the team is defining the requirements.
However verbal conversation has its limitations. Building products should not be a competition for how much information we can retain in our heads. When communicating verbally, there is a higher chance that information is missed or misunderstood. Long term retention after a verbal conversation is relatively low.