Writing a Product Requirement Document (PRD)
Earlier I had written an article about “Creating product requirements” and I hope it helped a lot of new product managers. I wanted to write a detailed PRD in hopes of helping other PMs.
The PRD was for a failed startup attempt but I hope it would help others to structure their product requirement.
Intro & Goals
“Helping India to become atmanirbhar”
We’re solving problems of trade for the entire supply chain, from manufacturer to distributors to retailers to the end consumers. For the MVP stage, we will focus on solving the trade between the manufacturer and distributor/retailer. We will consider only two user personas — the sellers and the buyers for this stage.
User Personas
- Sellers — Consider these to be the manufacturer or the reseller who wants to sell their products (or services) to their buyers
- Buyers — Consider these to be the retailer or the Kirana Shops who wants to buy and resell the seller’s items to the end-consumers
MVP Overview
Right now the seller and buyer usually do their trading offline; the seller will send product catalog/product pictures via WhatsApp to the buyer, and the buyer, in turn, chooses the products and verbally places the order (if the seller is selling F2F) otherwise places the order through WhatsApp or call.
We’re trying to solve this process — Selling products through WhatsApp. We’re giving sellers an easy way to package their products in a shareable link, that can be shared across platforms like WhatsApp and buyers can place an order through that link
Mockups
High-level stories with screens
As a seller, I want to list my products so that I can create multiple catalogs with them
As a seller, I want to view all my listed products
As a seller, I want to create catalogs from the listed products so that I can share them with my buyers
As a seller, I want to view all my catalogs and share them
As a seller, I want to edit the created catalogs
As a seller, I want to share the catalog with my buyer
As a buyer, I want to view the catalog and products in them so that I can place my order
As a seller, I want to accept the buyer’s order so that I can fulfill my buyer’s needs
As a buyer, I want to check the accepted order and view the generated invoice
Go To Market
- The plan is to target one apartment complex and the shops nearby that (2–3 shops)
- We meet the shop owners and onboard them
- Post the catalog link on the apartment complex’s WA groups
- Collect data and feedback to iterate and reach a PMF
Future Roadmap
Building the entire retail social platform along with the features like ‘Auto Sale’ and ‘Uberization’ can help us being a differentiator.
Competitors & Product Inspiration
- JioMart — JioMart is our direct competitor but we’re solving use cases that JioMart is not. JioMart is a complete WhatsApp retail platform but ours is a retail social platform where WhatsApp is one of the channels. Think YouTube and TikTok, we’re TikTok of retail and JioMart is YouTube :P
- Meesho & Glowroad — As we scale and onboard different parties of the supply chain, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and re-seller we will also compete with Meesho/Glowroad for the reseller target segment though our delivery mechanism will be different
- Dunzo & SwiggyDaily — When we build and target the ‘Auto Sale’ channel, these will also be our competitors + partners
