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Marketing Requirements Document
Quick Summary
Document created by Marketing or Business group or other representatives of "customers" and "users" to express the perceived customer wants and needs for product, system, or service.
What this is
Document created by Marketing or Business group or other representatives of "customers" and "users" to express the perceived customer wants and needs for product, system, or service. These customers may include both external and internal customers. Marketing, or the Product Manager, or the Business Representative, is responsible for what gets developed and why.
The primary audience for the document is the project team, and specifically the functional groups that must determine how to implement the product, system, or service to meet those requirements. The team is responsible for how to develop what Marketing has requested.
Why it's useful
A good MRD ensures that the project is driven by true customer needs and a sound business proposition. The MRD outline includes introductory sections for setting the market or user context—why is this product, system, or service needed, what market segment or user group is it targeting? And what is most important to that group? A good MRD will also make relative priorities of features or functionality clear.
How to use it
- After a project idea has been raised, fed into the company's "project pipeline review" process, and approved for further attention, a draft MRD should be created. This document is typically written by the Product Marketing Manager with assistance from research, marketing communications, sales, engineering and finance.
- Review the draft MRD (or elements of it) with internal customers, and if possible with key friendly external customers, to ensure that the requirements are accurate and to get input on priorities.
- Create an economic justification for the project, to go along with the feature/function definitions in the MRD.
- Update the MRD from all review comments so far, then provide the document to the newly-formed project team.
- The project team will use the MRD as input for the project definition or scoping process. (See our template for Project Definition - Project Vision Document and the Product Requirements Specification). The MRD represents the master list of all the things that could be created by this project, if we could give the customer everything we think they want.
- The Project Vision and accompanying more detailed specs such as a Product Requirements Specification (also often called a Functional Specification) will ultimately document final decisions on what items will definitely be done on the project. Constraints on time and people will often mean that not all the items in the MRD can be done on this project. The team will negotiate what requirements make the cut, and document them in the Product Requirements Specification.
- If the MRD is updated at the end of the Initiation phase to be consistent with the final Project Vision decisions, maintain a record of the original customer requirements before any trade-offs were made.
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