How to Write PRDs Engineers Actually Respect

I have read hundreds of PRDs over my career. Most of them were useless.

Not because the PM was bad at their job. But because they were solving the wrong problem. They were written to justify a decision that had already been made, or to satisfy a stakeholder who wanted to see “the spec,” or to check a process box. They were not written to help engineers build the right thing.

If you want engineers to respect your PRDs, you have to rethink what a PRD is actually for.

What Engineers Need That Most PRDs Don’t Provide

When an engineer reads a PRD, they are trying to answer four questions:

1. Why are we building this?
2. What problem are we actually solving?
3. What are the constraints I have to work within?
4. What are we explicitly not doing?

Most PRDs answer only a version of question two — usually at a shallow level — and skip the rest entirely.

The result is predictable. Engineers read the spec, feel like they are missing context, fill in the blanks with their own assumptions, and build something adjacent to what the PM actually wanted. Then there is a review cycle, things get reworked, everyone is frustrated, and the PM concludes that “engineers don’t read specs.” They do read specs. They just found this one unhelpful.

Decision Context: The Most Underrated Section

Before describing what you want to build, explain why this decision was made.

Not a summary of the problem. The decision rationale. Who pushed for this? What data drove the prioritization? What alternatives did you consider and reject? What would happen if you built nothing?

This section is uncomfortable to write because it requires you to be honest about uncertainty and tradeoffs. But it is invaluable to engineers because it tells them what assumptions the whole initiative rests on. If one of those assumptions is wrong, a good engineer will tell you before you are three weeks into implementation.

Engineers who understand the decision context also build better software. They know which parts of the design are load-bearing and which are hypotheses being tested. That knowledge shapes their technical choices in ways that produce better outcomes.

Constraints Are Not Restrictions — They Are Information

Most PMs treat constraints as a list of annoying limitations to acknowledge. Engineers treat them as the most useful information in the document.

Write a dedicated constraints section and be specific:

• Technical constraints: Are we building on an existing data model that limits certain approaches? Is there a performance requirement driven by current scale? Are there third-party API limitations?
• Business constraints: Is there a hard deadline because of a customer commitment? Is there a budget ceiling that affects infrastructure choices?
• Compliance constraints: For B2B SaaS products especially — are there data residency, privacy, or regulatory requirements?

A constraint clearly stated saves hours of review meetings. It also signals to engineers that you did your homework before writing the spec, which matters for credibility.

Explicit Trade-offs: Show Your Work

Every product decision involves trade-offs. Most PRDs hide them.

If you chose speed over scalability, say so. If you chose a simpler user experience at the cost of edge case handling, say so. If you are deprioritizing mobile because 80% of your users are desktop, say so.

Writing trade-offs explicitly does two things. First, it prevents engineers from spending time optimizing for dimensions you have already deliberately de-prioritized. Second, it creates an artifact you can point to when someone later asks “why didn’t we build it this way?” — because you made a conscious choice, not an oversight.

A simple format that works: “We are optimizing for X over Y because Z. If this tradeoff turns out to be wrong, we will revisit in [timeframe/trigger].”

Non-Goals Are as Important as Goals

This is the most consistently missing section in product specs, and its absence causes enormous waste.

Non-goals are not failures. They are scoping decisions. Write them down.

Examples of what a useful non-goals section looks like:

• We are not building admin configuration for this feature in V1. Admins will manage this through the backend.
• We are not handling multi-currency in this release. Single-currency behavior is the only supported case.
• We are not optimizing for this workflow on mobile. Desktop-only is acceptable for now.

Every item in your non-goals section represents a class of engineering decision that does not need to be made in this cycle. That is not a limitation — it is a gift. You are telling engineers exactly where they can draw the line, which makes their estimates more accurate and their implementation more focused.

The Right Length

There is no right answer, but there is a useful heuristic: a PRD should be as short as possible while still answering the four questions above.

Most PRDs are too long in the wrong places (background context, business justification, screenshots of competitor products) and too short in the right ones (constraints, non-goals, decision rationale).

A PRD that is three pages but includes a clear decision context, explicit constraints, visible trade-offs, and a tight non-goals list is worth ten pages of user stories and wireframes without those elements.

A Format That Works

Here is a stripped-down template that consistently produces useful PRDs:

Problem statement: One paragraph. What user or business problem are we solving?

Decision context: Why now, why this approach, what alternatives were considered.

Goals: What success looks like. Measurable where possible.

Non-goals: What we are explicitly not doing in this cycle.

Functional requirements: What the product needs to do. Behavior, not implementation.

Constraints: Technical, business, and compliance limitations.

Trade-offs: What we are optimizing for and what we are sacrificing.

Open questions: Things still unresolved that could affect implementation.

That last section — open questions — is powerful. It signals intellectual honesty. It tells engineers that you are not pretending to have all the answers, and it invites them into the thinking rather than presenting them with a finished verdict.

The Meta-Point

Engineers do not respect PRDs that treat them as output receivers. They respect PRDs that treat them as thinking partners.

A great PRD is not a document that tells engineers what to build. It is a document that explains the problem clearly enough that intelligent engineers can figure out the best way to solve it — and that captures enough context that decisions made during implementation are well-calibrated.

If your PRDs are not being read, the problem probably isn’t the engineers.