Product managers create a ton of documents. Some are important, but some are even more important—like, "everything might fall apart without them"! Product management documentation is not just about ticking boxes. These documents are the backbone of every successful launch, iteration, and development. Whether it's the product manager PRD, new product development documents, or tracking OKRs, each PM document serves a distinct purpose. Every step involves meticulous product development documentation.
From the first product manager requirements document to the final results and measurement reports. These aren't just types of product documentation—they're your roadmap, playbook, and lifeline.
(There is nothing that PMs do that is not important 😜)
Today, I’ll talk about ten Product Management Documents we, as product managers, create and their importance.
This edition has the first 5 of the 10 documents. Stay tuned for next week’s edition, which will include the remaining.
What is Product Documentation?
Product documentation includes all the details about a product, how it works, and its features. It's essential for every company because it connects the product team with customers.
This documentation gives valuable information about the product, like release notes and guides.
Well-made product documentation can reduce the need for customer support, encourage customers to find answers independently and help grow your business.
10 Documents Every Product Manager Should Create
- OKR (or KPI) document
- Product roadmap
- Product proposal/product one pager/business case
- Product requirements document (PRD) / Product specifications document (spec)
- User stories
- Project pages
- Progress updates
- Release notes
- Training material / Go-to-market plan / FAQ / Internal guides
- Results and measurement of goals
These documents help product managers stay organized and ensure clear communication across teams. Each plays a crucial role in delivering a successful product, from setting goals to measuring success.
Let’s take a look into it in detail:
1. OKR (or KPI) document
OKRs
Objective & Key Results (OKRs) is a methodology for setting and measuring progress on those objectives.
Objectives be meaningful, concrete, and clearly defined. They should be inspirational.
Key results (KRs) should be objective and measurable. They should help the team measure the extent to which they successfully achieve the objectives. A KR should be very concrete and clear. There should be no opportunity for "grey areas" or different interpretations. This is the first and most crucial product document one must have.
KPIs
On the other hand, a key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurement tool that helps quantify the progress (and success) of different tasks. KPIs are metrics that measure the progress and success of the functions that are most critical to the business goals.
There can be many metrics, but not all of them are KPIs.
Different companies and teams use these two methodologies differently. Some teams create OKRs and follow them throughout the year. Other teams have broad goals and have KPIs to measure progress.
You should follow what feels natural and easy for you and your team.
As a first step, the PM and the EM create both documents (OKRs and KPI doc) collectively. Then, OKRs (or KPIs) are reviewed and approved by someone senior in the hierarchy. The approval ensures that the team’s objectives align with the company’s goals and vision.
Example for OKRs:
- Objective: Increase reporting reliability
- KR1: Ensure report generation time is less than 60 seconds for at least 80% of requests
- KR2: Ensure that report generation batch failures are less than 5%
Example for KPIs
- Business Goal: increase revenue in 2022
- KPI1: revenue from new sales
- KPI2: revenue from upsells
- KPI3: revenue from retention
Why are OKRs and KPIs Documents Important?
- Help You Set Ambitious Goals
OKRs and KPIs provide a structured framework for setting ambitious yet achievable goals. By defining clear objectives and key results, you can challenge your team to strive for excellence and push beyond their comfort zones.
- Help You Track Progress
One key benefit of OKRs and KPIs is their ability to track progress effectively. By regularly monitoring key metrics and milestones, you can gauge how well your team is performing and identify areas that may need improvement.
- Steer You in the Right Direction
OKRs and KPIs act as compass points for your product strategy, guiding you toward your desired outcomes. By aligning your goals with your overarching vision and mission, you can ensure that every decision and action moves you closer to success.
- Provide Clarity and Direction
Clarity is crucial in a fast-paced environment. OKRs and KPIs help clarify what needs to be achieved and how success will be measured. This clarity enables everyone on the team to understand their roles and responsibilities, fostering alignment and collaboration.
- Ensure Everyone is Aligned
OKRs and KPIs serve as a unifying force, aligning individual and team efforts with the organization's broader goals. By ensuring that everyone is working towards the same objectives, you can harness your team's collective power and maximize efficiency and effectiveness.
- Give You Real-time Feedback on Success
Finally, OKRs and KPIs provide real-time feedback on your product's success. By tracking key metrics and performance indicators, you can quickly identify what's working well and what's not, allowing you to make informed decisions and course corrections as needed.
2. Product roadmap
A roadmap is a critical product manager PRD created and maintained throughout their product management career. The primary goal of a roadmap is to help all stakeholders understand what features get built in what sequence and when.
The sequence helps everyone understand the priority of the items on the roadmap. The “when” highlights the tentative dates when said features will be available to the users.
Finally, a roadmap also contains a backlog of all the essential features that need to be more important to build soon. These features have a priority associated with them but probably will not have a release timeline.
3. Product Proposal /One Pager/Business Case / etc.
The primary purpose of this document is to achieve alignment on new (product) ideas or ideas that require a significant amount of resources.
Typically, this product document includes:
- Business Problem
This section should underline the “why” we are doing or recommending to do something. It should include specifics about the problem - quantitative research, data analysis, etc. This section should give the readers all the information needed to buy in (or not) the idea.
It also includes some type of sizing for the problem. It is always helpful to know if the issue at hand is a $10K vs. $10Mn
- User Problem
This section highlights the pain, need, or problem the users face.
- This section should primarily focus on the user’s problem, which means this might be different from the previous (business problem) section.
- This section should include ALL the product's user personas and highlight why we’re focusing on a specific persona.
- This section should include data and user research
- It should consist of all the evidence that we have collected about the problem
- Evidence should be concrete and not ambiguous at all
It is important to remember that stakeholder and partner teams validate and verify all of the content in this section. This helps ensure that we're not misrepresenting any evidence.
- Hypothesis
Every one pager should have a clearly defined hypothesis.
A typical hypothesis follows: “By doing X, Y will happen.”
For example: “By ingesting additional consumer events into our analytics platform, we will reduce the time to analysis for consumer teams by xx%.”
Make the hypothesis as objective and quantifiable as possible. Think of this section as answering the question - “what are we gaining from investing in the idea that we're recommending through the one-pager?"
- Opportunity Sizing
This section should help understand the quantifiable and measurable impact of solving the above-stated problem.
It is best if the impact is measured from the perspective of the business.
For example: “Reducing the time to analysis by xx% will save us XXX hours of analysis time across PM, Engineering, and DS teams. This saving translates to a cost saving of $XXX,000 per year.”
- Description/details
This section should explain the problem in more detail. Think of adding screenshots, detailed user flows, diagrams, etc.
The goal of this section is to help readers understand the actual problem. So feel free to get down and dirty and share as much information as you need. Feel free to make it technical, but maintain a good balance, as a non-technical audience will read the document.
This section should also include some sense of the development cost (aka investment required) to create the proposed solution.
Typically, one-pagers are written early in the life cycle, and you might need accurate timelines or effort estimates. That is OK.
In that case, discuss with engineers to get a ballpark estimation of the investment required.
- Experiment details (optional)
There are times when the one-pager only recommends an experiment.
Sometimes, the proposal includes some assumptions; the best way to validate those assumptions is to run an experiment.
In such a case, use this section to share details of the experiment setup, primary and secondary metrics, etc.
Success criteria
- This section should answer the question - “how do we know this is successful?”
- This section should include the metrics we intend to measure success.
- This should also include goals for the metrics.
For example:
- Primary metric: time to analysis
- Goal: reduce by 13%
I also like to include secondary metrics and guardrail metrics in this section.
If there is already a dashboard or report that you use to monitor the metrics mentioned above, please add links in this section.
- Open Questions / Out of Scope / Things To Do Later (optional)
This section should include unanswered questions when writing the one-pager.
It could also include items that needed to be added to the scope on purpose.
This section's goal is to document the conscious decisions and/or tradeoffs you made while creating the one-pager.
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4. Product Requirements Document (PRD) / Product Specifications Document (Spec)
A product requirements document is an agreement between the product manager and the engineers on the scope they decide to develop as part of the next release cycle.
Typically, the PM (product manager) creates this document, but it undergoes multiple iterations based on feedback, comments, and questions from the engineers.
Read this article for more details on product management documentation - what it is and how to create a comprehensive one.
5. User stories
User stories are usually a replacement for PRDs and are more commonly used by teams following agile software development methodologies.
A user story is an easy-to-understand product feature description written from the users’ point of view. It focuses on explaining what the user can do with the product feature and the value that they should get from the product or feature.
A typical user story follows the format of "As a user, I should be able to do <<insert action here>> so that I can <<insert value here>>"
Like PRDs, user stories are agreements about what the team will develop as part of the release cycle.
PMs should also include acceptance criteria for each user story to ensure comprehensiveness.
Acceptance criteria are conditions the feature must satisfy before the team makes it available to real users.
Acceptance criteria also help in the following:
- Removing ambiguity from the user stories (and requirements)
- Creating precise testing (go/no-go) conditions for the specific feature preventing scope creep
Product Documents Example
User Story
As a manager, I want to change my team member’s task status so that I can keep the
status sheet accurate at all times.
Acceptance Criteria:
- The manager should be able to change the status of her team members’ tasks.
- Given that the manager has changed the status of member A’s project, the updated status should be reflected in member A’s view.
- A new entry in the change log with the user ID of the manager, project ID, original value, changed value, and the timestamp should be stored
6. Project pages
Project pages are simple documents that do three main things. For each project, it includes:
- Details of the team and people who are working on the project
- Links to relevant documents, details, JIRA tickets, analysis
- Most updated status on the overall project
PM, EM, and engineers collectively own the creation and updating of this page.
Project pages make it very simple for executives, people managers, and non-technical stakeholders to track the progress of their projects of interest.
There is no set format for this page, but I like having Wiki pages with 3 different sections:
- Project details and progress
- Milestones
- Supporting links and docs
(Screenshots below, full sample doc here)
Project details and progress sample
(Milestones and additional links sample)
7. Progress updates
I like to do most progress updates via email and very few via face-to-face meetings.
Generally, the channel you use depends on the kind of project, audience, and a few other factors – simple, regular, standard updates via email, urgent, primary, and complex updates via face-to-face meetings.
Remembering that “progress updates” are “updates” and not a detailed project explanation is essential.
Hence, I keep my updates simple, brief, and to the point:
- Project status: on track/delayed/live
- Launch date Current focus: what is the team working on right now
- Next milestone: what will the team work on next
- More information: links to resources(Sample screenshot below)
Sample email progress update
8. Release Notes
Release notes include a list of new features, minor changes, enhancements, and bug fixes launched with their respective launch dates.
More often than not, release notes are technical and created by the engineering team working on the launch.
The primary audience of this document is a mix of EMs, engineers, and PMs.
Most teams maintain a repository of release notes, which easily references all past product launch details.
9. Training material / Go-to-market plan / FAQ / Internal guides
These documents are typically created only for medium or large product launches.
In my experience, I have created such documents when I’ve needed to do one or more of the following:
- Train Internal Teams on New Products/Features
Customer-facing teams (e.g., customer support) must know how the product works and have the required information to help users use it and resolve issues. So, it is critical to create detailed training modules, FAQs, and product guides every time there is a significant launch.
- Enable Launch Teams to Drive Awareness And Adoption
I’ve been part of launches that required a lot of PR and marketing to create hype and awareness of specific launches. Such activities need multiple teams (product, engineering, marketing, design, etc.). And having a detailed GTM (go-to-market) plan makes it easier to collaborate and deliver.
- Enable Teams to Deliver on Time Successfully
I’ve had launches with multiple complex dependencies across various teams. A delay from a single team flows to all downstream teams, leading to a delay in the final launch. In these cases, a detailed launch plan helps define the deliverables, owners, and ETAs and ensure every person is speaking the same language.
Most of these documents do not have a set format. But since their audiences are diverse, it is critical to use a format that all persons understand easily.The best way to start is to learn from other PMs what has worked in the past. If that’s not an option, work directly with the internal stakeholders (or internal customers) to co-create templates for each case.
10. Results And Measurement of Goals
Product managers create these documents/emails when they have meaningful results from a recent launch or an experiment. The document aims to inform senior leaders and other stakeholders of the results and the appropriate next steps (where relevant.)As always, I keep this super simple:
- What is it
- What are the results: metrics and definition
- What are the next steps
- Links to raw data and other details(Screenshot below)
I also like maintaining a log of these updates in a single document for easy reference.
Sample update with experiment results
Wrapping Up!
And that’s a wrap for today! These 10 product management documents are essential tools every PM should have in their toolkit. Each one plays a vital role in keeping your team aligned, organized, and moving forward.
Stay tuned for more, where JAPM shares the remaining documents that are just as crucial to your product management journey's success.
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