Software Product Requirements: The Complete Guide How to Write Decent High-Level Project Specifications (Sample Specs Inside)

So the day has come.

You got your superb idea for a product. You are sure customers will love it, investors will be more than happy to give you their money for product development—you will change the world for the better.

You can’t sleep at night exploring all kinds of different scenarios how your product will be used. You are playing with customer segments in your head, creating back-of-the-envelope lists of features for future releases.

The only thing you need to do now is to validate your hypothesis with an MVP to make sure you build exactly what the world needs.

But as the saying goes, ideas are nothing without execution. So the most difficult part of your work begins now. 

I assume you are like me: a product manager with a growth-oriented approach, but without a strong technical toolkit. You probably need someone to help you build your product. There could be multiple scenarios:

1. you work in a large organization and need to “sell” your vision to your CTO/tech department to get some estimates and decide whether to invest in it or not,
2. you want to create the product with the help of a friendly developer(s), but you still need to share your shiny idea with them to explain what you need to build,
3. you decided to build it using a software house team and you need to give them input so they can prepare a high-level estimate.

(By the way, if you happen to fall under case #3, we have a full guide on how to compare estimates from software vendors.)

In all of those cases you need a tangible artifact. A medium that will allow you to explain to others what your product is all about and what features it must have to conquer the market (and the world). 

So you need a high-level product specification. This step-by-step manual will help you prepare it (without spending too much time).

Just to be clear: this blog post is not about the development process, agile sprint length, release cadence, communication setup, tools, etc. It is simply about creating the product requirements.