Execution: PRDs, working with the team and launching

Writing a PRD

A product requirements document aligns everyone. A good one includes:

1. Problem and context: who has the problem, evidence, why now.
2. Goals and success metrics: what will change, how you'll measure it, guardrails.
3. Non-goals: what's explicitly out of scope.
4. Users and use cases / user stories.
5. Requirements: functional behaviour, edge cases, non-functional needs, analytics events to track.
6. Design: links to flows and mock-ups.
7. Open questions, risks and dependencies.
8. Launch plan: rollout, experiments, communication.

Keep it short and alive; involve design and engineering early so it reflects shared thinking.

Working with design and engineering

• Bring problems, not solutions. Let designers and engineers help shape the solution.
• Engineers estimate; PMs make scope trade-offs (reduce scope rather than squeezing estimates).
• Be available to answer questions; make decisions quickly; protect the team from churn.
• Understand technical concepts enough to discuss trade-offs (APIs, databases, performance, technical debt), even without coding.
• Agile ceremonies: backlog refinement, sprint planning, stand-ups, reviews, retrospectives.

Launching

• Rollout strategy: internal dogfooding → beta → percentage rollout with feature flags → full launch.
• Go-to-market with marketing, sales and support: positioning, messaging, pricing (if any), training, help articles, announcements.
• Monitoring: dashboards for success and guardrail metrics, error rates, feedback channels.
• A post-launch review: did we hit the goals? What did we learn? What's next?

Stakeholder management

Share context widely, communicate decisions and their reasons, give regular updates, and disagree openly but respectfully. Influence comes from evidence and trust, not authority.

Check yourself

• List the sections of a PRD for "save jobs to apply later".
• What would you do if engineering says a feature will take three times longer than expected?
• Plan a rollout for a new payment method.