We explore this topic in great detail in our Requirements That Work seminar. In short, Product management writes requirements; development writes specifications. A requirement is a full explanation of a problem; a spec is a full description of the solution. With these definitions in mind, which best represent your documents?

Every company has its own nomenclature including Business Requirements Documents (BRD), Market Requirements Document (MRD), Product Requirements Document (PRD) and others. These companies also have different specifications documents at the product, design, and feature levels.

I’ve completely abandoned the traditional “the product shall” approach to writing requirements. Instead, I encourage product management to focus on the problems and let development focus on how to solve the problems. Many of the requirements that I read are in fact thinly- veiled feature descriptions.

If your company is considering introducing a new artifact, my guess is that you really need to introduce a new role! You’re probably missing a designer. Product managers have a full time job indentifying and quantifying the market problems. Your developers probably have their hands full delivering solutions. But who is designing those solutions? 

No hardware company would build products without a designer, why do software companies? A designer analyzes the problem and designs a solution. Their output is a specification that the developers will use to develop to.

For more on this, check out my article On Reqs and Specs to learn more about these distinctions.

Answered by Steve Johnson