OVERVIEW
概述
The PRD describes the product your company will build. It drives the efforts of the entire product team and the company’s sales, marketing and customer support efforts. It’s hard to come up with a more important, higher leverage piece of work for a company.
PRD描述了公司将要构建的产品。它推动着整个产品团队以及公司的销售、营销和客户支持的努力。对于一家公司来说，很难找到一个更重要、更有影响力的工作。
The purpose of the product requirements document (PRD) or product spec is to clearly and unambiguously articulate the product’s purpose, features, functionality, and behavior. The product team will use this specification to actually build and test the product, so it needs to be complete enough to provide them the information they need to do their jobs.
产品需求文档(PRD)或产品规格说明书的目的是清晰和毫不含糊地阐明产品的目的、特性、功能和行为。产品团队将使用该规范实际构建和测试产品，因此它需要足够完整，从而能够提供完成工作所需的信息。
If the PRD is done well, it still might not be a successful product, but it is certain that if the PRD is not done well, it is nearly impossible for a good product to result.
如果PRD做得好，或许不一定有一个成功的产品，但可以肯定的是，如果PRD做得不好，几乎不可能有一个好的产品。
The PRD versus the MRD
PRD vs MRD
We draw a distinction here between the product requirements and the market requirements (often referred to as the “MRD”). Put very simply, the market requirements describe the opportunity or the market need, and the product requirements describe a product that addresses that opportunity or need.
我们在这里区分了产品需求和市场需求（通常称为“MRD”）。简单地说，市场需求描述的是机会或市场需要，而产品需求描述的是满足这种机会或需要的产品。
The PRD versus the Product Strategy and Roadmap
PRD vs 产品战略和路线图
The product strategy describes a vision, typically between two and five years out, of where you want the product to go, and the product roadmap describes the various steps to get there. The PRD describes a particular product release along that path.
产品战略描述了一个愿景，通常是在两到五年之后，你希望产品发展到什么程度，而产品路线图描述了实现该目标的各个步骤。PRD描述了沿着这条道路发布的一个特定的产品。
正文
The purpose of this paper is to describe a proven, repeatable process to create a good PRD. The ten steps described here are not easy, but they can help you produce a strong PRD. The amount of time this process takes depends greatly on the size and complexity of your product, and how prepared you are in terms of the knowledge and skills required.
本文的目的是描述一个经过验证的，可重复的过程，以创建一个良好的PRD。这里介绍的十个步骤并不容易，但它们可以帮助你建立一个强大的PRD。这个过程所花费的时间在很大程度上取决于你的产品的大小和复杂性，以及你在知识和技能方面的准备程度。
Step 1: Do Your Homework
第一步：做功课
Your goal with the PRD is to come up with a compelling product. In order to do this, you must do your homework. This means studying your customers, your competitors, and your team’s capabilities, including available technologies.
你的PRD的目标是构想出一个引人注目的产品。为了做到这一点，你必须做功课。这意味着要研究您的客户、竞争对手和团队的能力，包括可用的技术。
This begins with customers, users, competitors, industry analysts, your product team, your sales force, marketing, company executives, other employees – anyone that has insight into the problem and possible solutions.
从客户、用户、竞争对手、行业分析师、你的产品团队、你的销售团队、市场营销人员、公司高管、其他员工——任何对问题和可能的解决方案有洞察力的人开始。
Realize also that a significant factor in your ability to convince the team of the eventual success of the product is the degree of confidence you project, and you will be more confident and more convincing if you’ve done your homework well.
还要认识到，在您说服团队相信产品最终成功的能力中，一个重要的因素是您所展现的信心程度，如果您做好了功课，您将会变得更加自信，更加具有说服力。
Step 2: Define the Product’s Purpose
第二步：定义产品的目标
Every good product starts with a need that it is trying to fill. You must have a clear understanding of that need, and how your product addresses that need.
每一个好的产品都是从它想要满足的需要开始的。您必须清楚地了解这种需要，以及您的产品如何满足这种需要。
It is essential that the product manager establish a very clear, concise value proposition that lets her easily communicate to everyone – the product team members, company executives, customers, the sales force – what the point of this product really is.
产品经理必须建立一个非常清晰、简洁的价值主张，让它能够很容易地与所有人沟通——产品团队成员、公司高管、客户、销售团队——这个产品的真正意义是什么。
While this sounds obvious, few products have such a clear value proposition.
尽管这听起来是显而易见的，但很少有产品有如此明确的价值主张。
Consider the “elevator pitch” test. If you had a chance to ride the elevator with the CEO of your company, and she asked what the point of your product was, could you answer that question before the ride is up? If not, you have work to do.
考虑一下“电梯游说”测试。如果你有机会和你公司的CEO一起乘坐电梯，她问你的产品有什么意义，你能在电梯到达之前回答这个问题吗？如果没有，你还有工作要做。
It may be that the product does not have focus; it may be trying to do so many things that nothing clearly stands out. It may be that what you think is the big thing is just not resonating with customers. It could be that your product is trying to solve a nonproblem; maybe you have a technology that you’re still trying to find an application for.
可能是产品没有焦点；它也可能会尝试做很多事情，但没有任何事情是明显突出的。也许你认为最重要的是不能与客户产生共鸣。它可能是你的产品试图解决一个无关紧要的问题；也许你有一项还在努力寻找如何应用的技术。
The value proposition should also make clear how this product helps deliver on the product strategy. Note that you do not need to talk about every little feature; in terms of a clear value proposition, less is truly more.
价值主张还应该明确该产品如何有助于实现产品战略。注意，您不需要讨论每个小特征;就明确的价值主张而言，少即是多。
The product requirements need to specify exactly what the objectives of this specific product release is, and how they will be measured. The objectives should also be prioritized.
产品需求需要准确地指定这个特定产品发布的目标是什么，以及如何度量它们。这些目标也应有优先级。
For example, your objectives may be: 1) ease of use, 2) retail price under $100, and 3) compatibility with previous release. You could then go on to elaborate on how you will measure these objectives. For items like a specific retail price, it is straightforward. For items like “ease of use,” you need to be specific as to what level of usability the product requires. This is typically defined in terms of the target user. Usability engineers can rate the usability of your product for a given type of user. They can also rate the severity of usability issues, and you may specify that there will be no major usability issues.
例如，您的目标可能是：1）易于使用；2）零售价低于100美元；3）兼容以前的版本。然后，您可以进一步详细说明如何度量这些目标。对于像明确的零售价格这样的条目，这是显而易见的。对于像“易用性”之类的条目，您需要明确产品需要的可用性级别。这通常是根据目标用户定义的。可用性工程师可以为特定类型的用户评估产品的可用性。他们还可以评估可用性问题的严重性，您可以说明没有主要的可用性问题。
The key is to be very clear to everyone involved just what success looks like, and to provide the guidance that the product team needs in order to make the necessary trade-offs in design and implementation.
关键是要让每个参与者都清楚成功是什么样子的，并提供产品团队所需的指导，以便在设计和实现中做出必要的权衡。
Step 3: Define the User Profiles, Goals and Tasks
第三步：定义用户资料、目标和任务
Now that you understand what problem you want to solve, the next step begins with an in-depth understanding of the target users and customer. During this step, it is important to work very closely with your product designer.
现在您已经了解了想要解决的问题，下一步将从深入了解目标用户和客户开始。在这一步中，与产品设计师密切合作是非常重要的。
User Profiles
用户资料
By this stage, the product manager will have hopefully met with many target customers, and have spent considerable time with first-hand observations and discussions. Now we need to classify the types of users and customers, and to determine who the primary users are.
在这个阶段，产品经理有希望会见到许多目标客户，并花了相当多的时间进行第一手的观察和讨论。现在我们需要对用户和客户的类型进行分类，并确定谁是主要用户。
For example, if you’re building an Internet auction service such as eBay, you know that you have both buyers and sellers, and for each of those you have low volume/occasional users and high-volume/frequent users. It is not hard to imagine that there are several other less prevalent types of users as well, such as the corporate purchasing agents that may buy items for their company.
例如，如果您正在构建像eBay这样的网络拍卖服务，您知道您同时拥有买家和卖家，并且对于每一个买家和卖家，您都拥有少量/偶尔使用的用户和大量/频繁使用的用户。不难想象，还有其他几种不太常见的用户类型，比如可能为公司购买商品的企业采购代理。
What the product manager and designer need to do is first identify the most important constituencies, and then try to characterize them in considerable detail, so that you can use these profiles to guide you in the design of the product. These profiles are sometimes called “personas” and while they should be fictitious, they should be as representative, realistic and plausible as you can make them. The idea is to come up with an archetype which captures the essence of this type of customer.
产品经理和设计人员需要做的是首先确定最重要的组成部分，然后尝试对它们进行相当详细的描述，以便在产品设计中使用这些概要文件进行指导。这些资料文件有时被称为“原型”，虽然它们可能是虚构的，但它们应该尽可能具有代表性、现实性和可信性。我们的想法是设计一个原型来捕捉这类客户的本质。
Here’s an example:
一个例子：
Leon the Power Seller is a 46 year old male that lives in Fresno and runs a small motorcycle parts business. While he does maintain a small shop, almost all of his sales come from eBay, where he sells on average 400 items per month. He sells a wide range of motorcycle related items, but his most popular items are saddle bags for Harley Davidson’s. He owns two big Harley’s himself, and he also drives a 1993 Toyota Pickup. Leon is married and has two teenage sons.
发动机销售里昂是一个46岁的男性，住在弗雷斯诺和经营一个小型摩托车零件业务。虽然他确实开了一家小店，但几乎所有的销售额都来自eBay，他在eBay上平均每月卖出400件商品。他销售各种各样的摩托车相关产品，但最受欢迎的是哈雷戴维森的马鞍包。他自己也有两辆大哈雷，他还开着一辆1993年的丰田皮卡。利昂已婚，有两个十几岁的儿子。
Leon bought his computer just so that he could use eBay, and seldom uses anything except eBay and e-mail. Leon has been selling on eBay for three years now, and has learned what he needed to in order to effectively sell. He has a feedback rating of over 5000, which he takes great pride in. When eBay changes things on the site, especially the selling process, it can be very aggravating for him to learn the differences and change his procedures.
里昂买电脑只是为了能使用易趣，除了易趣和电子邮件，他几乎什么都不用。里昂已经在eBay上卖了三年了，他已经学会了如何有效地销售。他的反馈评分超过5000，这让他非常自豪。当eBay改变网站上的东西，尤其是销售过程时，他会非常恼火地发现其中的差异，并改变自己的流程。
Leon has well-established routines where he lists items to sell on Monday, and most of his auctions end by Friday, and he tries to get the shipments out within a few hours of receiving the payments.
里昂有一个固定的惯例，他会在周一列出要出售的物品，大部分拍卖将在周五结束，他会在收到付款后的几个小时内把货物发出去。
Hopefully this description helps you get to know Leon and understand where he is coming from. As we consider new features, we can ask ourselves what Leon’s response to the feature would likely be, and what we would need to do in order to get him successfully utilizing it.
希望这个描述能帮助您了解里昂并理解他来自哪里。当我们考虑新特征时，我们可以问自己里昂对该特征的响应可能是什么，以及为了让他成功地使用该特征，我们需要做什么。
Narrowing the set of profiles down to just the key ones is essential. Trying to please everyone is futile, and typically ends up pleasing no one, so it is important to try and come up with the few most important and prevalent profiles. Similarly, if you do not try and precisely characterize your target user, you will have this abstract notion and find it difficult to understand how your customers will react. You’ll tend to assume that your customer is more like you than he really is.
将概要文件集缩小到关键的概要文件是非常重要的。试图取悦每一个人是徒劳的，而且通常不会取悦任何一个人，所以尝试并提出几个最重要和最流行的个人资料是很重要的。类似地，如果您不尝试准确地描述目标用户，您将会有这个抽象的概念，并且很难理解您的客户将如何反应。你会倾向于认为你的客户比他实际更像你。
User Goals
用户目标
Once we have identified and characterized our main types of users, we then need to identify what each user’s main goals or objectives are in using this product. This may sound simple, but it can often be challenging to untangle the underlying problem to be solved, when all around you people are telling you essentially the solution they think they want.
一旦我们确定并描述了我们的主要用户类型，我们就需要确定每个用户在使用该产品时的主要目标。这听起来可能很简单，但是当你周围的人都在告诉你他们认为他们想要的解决方案时，理清要解决的潜在问题通常是很有挑战性的。
Everyone from the CEO to sales reps to engineers to customers are all too happy to “help” you come up with the solution. They’ll tell you that you need to add a button or a shortcut in a particular place, or add a specific feature because a competitor has it, or change the colors because they don’t like it.
从首席执行官到销售代表，从工程师到客户，每个人都非常乐意“帮助”你想出解决方案。他们会告诉你，你需要在一个特定的地方添加一个按钮或快捷方式，或添加一个特定的功能，因为竞争对手有它，或改变颜色，因为他们不喜欢它。
The problem with jumping right to the solution is that there are often much better ways of solving a problem that the product manager and designer can come up with, if they are given the time and the freedom to come up with alternative solutions.
直接跳到解决方案的问题是，如果产品经理和设计师有时间和自由提出替代解决方案，他们通常可以找到更好的方法来解决问题。
The best solution hinges on having a clear understanding of just what problem needs to be solved. The objectives may be different for each user profile, so it is important to be able to look at the objectives in terms of the profile they relate to. It is very possible that the feature being requested addresses a problem that is not one of the objectives of the primary user profiles.
最好的解决方案取决于对需要解决的问题有一个清晰的认识。每个用户资料文件的目标可能是不同的，因此能够根据与之相关的资料文件查看目标是很重要的。很可能解决的问题所需的特性不是主要用户资料的目标之一。
Tasks
任务
With the user profiles and their associated goals in hand, we can now move on to designing the tasks that help these people accomplish their goals. This is the heart of the product specification process, and is the place where creativity and innovation are to be encouraged and facilitated as much as possible.
有了用户资料及其相关目标，我们现在可以继续设计帮助这些人实现目标的任务。这是产品规格化过程的核心，也是鼓励和促进创意和创新的地方。
Many outstanding products simply solve an existing problem in a new and better way. Sometimes this comes from the application of new technology, but mostly it comes from an insight that leads to a new approach.
许多优秀的产品只是用一种新的、更好的方式解决了现有的问题。有时这来自于对新技术的应用，但大多数情况下，这来自于对新方法的洞察。
For example, TiVo took the old problem of recording TV shows and came up with an entirely new approach that let customers accomplish their objectives much more easily, and established an entirely new category of electronics device.
例如，TiVo解决了电视节目录制的老问题，提出了一种全新的方法，让客户更容易地完成他们的目标，并建立了一个全新的电子设备类别。
Notice that we have talked about goals and tasks, but that we have not mentioned features. This is because features should be in support of required tasks that map to customer objectives. You will often find that many features either map to very low priority goals, or are simply extra functionality.
注意，我们已经讨论了目标和任务，但是没有提到特征。这是因为特征应该支持映射到客户目标所涉及的必需任务。您经常会发现许多特征要么映射到非常低的优先级目标，要么仅仅是额外的功能。
There are good reasons to eliminate any functionality you can in the name of making the required functionality more accessible. Ironically, the fewer features you have, the more powerful your product is often perceived. This is because the less features you have, the more features that your customers will actually discover and use, and the more they can successfully use, the more powerful they will perceive your product. The reason this is so counterintuitive is that most of us are not anything like our target customers, and we are willing to spend far more time exploring features and tolerating complexity than customers not in our industry.
以使所需的功能更易于访问的名义来消除您可以消除的任何功能，这是一个很好的理由。具有讽刺意味的是，您拥有的特征越少，您的产品通常就会被认为越强大。这是因为您拥有的特性越少，您的客户实际发现和使用的特性就越多，并且他们能够成功地使用的特性越多，他们对您的产品的感知就越强。如此违反直觉的原因是，我们中的大多数人与我们的目标客户完全不同，我们愿意花费比我们行业中的客户多得多的时间来探索特性和容忍复杂性。
