If you are a Product Manager and you like solving problems but dislike the documentation part, you will enjoy this post.

A PRD or Product Requirement Document is like holy text for tech companies. Well, at least Product Managers would like to believe so, whether it is true or not.

Albeit, at some point in your life you have written PRD voluntarily or involuntarily.

What if someone else wrote it for you?

Enter OpenAI.

Usually, on weekends I play around with different products to experience and learn something new.

I went to https://beta.openai.com/playground and created a PRD using AI.

Without giving any thought to what I wanted, I typed in my 1st Prompt:

Write a product requirement document to build a dashboard that helps the admin users to manage new e-commerce orders.

Here is what AI wrote:

The admin users should be able to:
— See all the new orders
— Filter the orders by their status
— Update the status of the orders
— Delete the orders
— Export the orders to a CSV file

This is how I would write PRD about 8 years back when I had no knowledge of Product Management.

It was kind of underwhelming.

I revised the prompt and typed this:

Write a product requirement document that contains Success metrics, scope, assumptions, and goals to build a dashboard that helps the admin users to manage new e-commerce orders.

Did you notice how I inserted the keywords like scope, goals for the AI to know that it should be considering those things?

Here is the result:

The admin users should be able to:

- See all the new orders

- Filter the orders by their status

- Update the status of the orders

- Delete the orders

- Export the orders to a CSV file

Success metrics:

- The admin users are able to see all the new orders

- The admin users are able to filter the orders by their status

- The admin users are able to update the status of the orders

- The admin users are able to delete the orders

- The admin users are able to export the orders to a CSV file

Scope:

- The dashboard should be built using React

- The orders should be fetched from an API

Assumptions:

- The API is already built and returns the necessary data

- The admin users are already familiar with React

Goals:

- The admin users should be able to manage new orders easily

The admin users should be able to export the orders to a CSV file

This has not blown my mind yet but it has the potential to write amazing documents.

One very interesting thing to consider, if it is “learning” from available data sources, then is it plagiarising content? Because some of the lines in the result are very specific eg. “The dashboard should be built using React.” Why React, why not Angular or Vuejs?

If AI truly has future, I will soon enough have to be expert at giving prompts to the AI and let it do the hard work; which I loathe anyway.

We will wait and watch where it goes from here.

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What do you think of my PRD? And what fun thing have you tried with AI? Share in comments.

See the PRD here:

https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/tRbZyvx1CYiL19zlo1SWspyf?model=text-davinci-002