What Is a Product Specs?
Product specs, or product specification, is an outline of the product, including its technical description, target performance, key requirements and functions. It may also contain such details as personas, business needs and objectives, technical standards and other information that helps answer the essential questions:
- What product are we building?
- What is it expected to achieve?
- How can we measure success?
A product spec is written by the product manager to guide the product team, so it needs to be very clear and concise, easy to read and not overly technical.
Elements Of a Product Spec
The key elements of any product specification are technical requirements and engineering specifications of a particular product. Yet, to describe it fully and create a bigger picture, a product specification sheet should include the following information:
- Summary: The outline of the product idea and its overall concept. A product summary explains what the final product will be like, why it is created, what features it will have, and what is the expected delivery timeframe.
- Business case: This section covers all business-related aspects or the product such as benefits for the company in the market, and the required budget and various resources.
- Personas: This section designates the target audience, including their demographic characteristics, behavior and major needs and challenges that will be solved by the product.
- User stories: These are short messages written from the user’s perspective and explaining what features a user wants to see and how they will be used. A user story also may contain acceptance criteria that determine if the corresponding user story is fulfilled, i.e. the feature is successfully implemented.
- Design: A visual representation of the final product’s appearance. This can be as simple as a note describing the product’s dimensions, or it can be done with simple drawings and illustrations to render the product’s looks and feel.
- Functional spec: This is an essential part of the document serving as a reference point for the product team and describing the capabilities of the product and how users will interact with it.
How to Write a Product Specification
Creating a product spec can be done in six steps:
- Define the problem: this will answer the question what business or customer needs the product will address and why it is feasible to be built.
- Review customer input: customer feedback can come in the form of complaints, suggestions, or feature requests and, if properly analyzed, it can help identify the customer’s real needs and pains.
- Discuss the product internally: bring the product team members and the stakeholders together to provide their vision of the product development and get everyone aligned.
- Determine product requirements and specifications: some specifications will be more critical for the product to be usable and safe, such as dimensions or safety standards, so they need to be specified in the specification sheet, while such details as UI/UX considerations may be left to be defined later.
- Do user testing: make a prototype and initialize user testing at an early stage to see how the product is accepted by customers, and which features are welcome and which are never used.
- Revise the product spec based on the user testing results and release it to the development team to begin building the product.
A product spec is a critical early step for product development as it communicates what you are building and why and provides technical guidance for the product team.
