---
title: PRDs Developers Actually Want to Read
description: What separates a PRD developers build straight from a PRD that generates a week of Slack threads - worked from a real traceability-tool PRD.
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---

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# PRDs Developers Actually Want to Read

by [Nyein Chan Aung](https://nyeinchanaung.me/resources/author/nyein-chan-aung) on September 8, 2026

[Project Management](https://nyeinchanaung.me/resources/tag/project-management) [Document](https://nyeinchanaung.me/resources/tag/document) [PRD](https://nyeinchanaung.me/resources/tag/prd)

A few years ago I wrote a PRD for a rice traceability tool — ShweBo Trace, built at Village Link to help track Shwe Bo Pawsan rice from seed to package, in support of the region's bid for Geographical Indication status. Twenty pages, slide-deck format: assumptions, scope, diagrams, a transaction flow, a glossary, UI sketches. I still think it's one of the more complete PRDs I've written, and going back through it recently to write this post, I noticed exactly where it was strong and exactly where a developer would still have had to walk over and ask me a question.

That gap is what this post is actually about. Not a general theory of documentation — a specific, honest look at one real PRD, what worked, and what I'd add if I wrote it again today.

## What the ShweBo Trace PRD got right

**An explicit assumptions section, treated as load-bearing.** Most of what made this document useful wasn't the feature list — it was a section near the top that stated, plainly, things like: transactions are made offline by scanning a QR code, a synced transaction can't be edited except by manual admin request, a pending transaction needs both parties to cancel it, and — critically — *a transaction can be totally or partially lost if a device breaks before syncing, or a user logs out before syncing*. That last one isn't a nice-to-know. It's the kind of fact that changes how a developer builds the sync logic, and it was written down before a single screen was designed.

**Scope broken out by actor, not by screen.** The mobile app scope wasn't "here are the app's features" — it was "here's what an Input Supplier does, here's what a Farmer does, here's what a Miller does." Four different actor types, each with their own login-to-transaction path. That structure is what let five different field roles share one offline-first app without the requirements turning into a single undifferentiated wall of bullet points.

**A glossary — "Terms of Reference" — for words that don't mean what they sound like.** "Realtime transaction" doesn't mean real-time in this system; it means "reported once synced, which might not be immediately." "Batch code" refers to merged paddy from multiple transactions, not a build identifier. Naming and defining these terms in one place heads off the kind of misunderstanding that otherwise surfaces three sprints later as a bug report against the wrong expectation.

**Diagrams that show what the prose can't.** A process-flow diagram across CMS admin and each mobile actor, and a system-design diagram showing the physical-to-digital handoff from buying seed through export. Neither replaces the written scope — they compress a page of "and then this actor does X, which triggers Y" into something a developer can trace with a finger.

## Where I'd add to it today

**No goals or success metrics.** The document says what to build in real detail. It never says what "working" looks like in a number. That's fine when the same person who wrote the PRD is also the one deciding when it's done — it stops being fine the moment a second stakeholder has a different idea of "done" than the delivery team does.

**No explicit non-goals.** To be fair, this PRD does state two real limitations directly in the assumptions — no mobile payment integration ("farmers and traders prefer cash for the time being"), and certificate validation can't trace offline transactions. Both are genuinely well-handled. What's missing is a dedicated section that collects boundaries like these in one place, so a reader doesn't have to find them scattered inside the assumptions to know what's deliberately out of scope.

**Flat feature bullets instead of testable stories.** "Farmers: Sowing, Harvesting, Selling to Aggregators" tells a developer what to build. It doesn't tell them what "done" means for Harvesting specifically — that the volume has to be checked against an estimated maximum yield, or what happens when it's exceeded. That detail exists elsewhere in the document (in the digital rules, in a UI sketch showing "Estimated Maximum Yield: 125,000 Kg"), but it isn't attached to the requirement it belongs to. A developer ends up assembling the actual acceptance criteria from three different pages.

**No priority.** Every requirement reads with equal weight. When a deadline gets tight — and on a twenty-month project like this one's related loan-management system, it will — someone has to decide what ships and what waits, and without a priority already assigned, that decision happens live, under pressure, instead of calmly in the document.

**Third-party dependencies with no owner.** The PRD correctly lists what the system depends on — domain and hosting, SSL, SMS for OTP, Firebase for notifications. It doesn't say who owns getting each one in place, or by when. That's usually the thing that quietly slips a launch date while every actual feature is finished on time.

## The template

I turned the gaps above into a standard structure I now use for every PRD: the same sections that worked in the original (assumptions, actor-based scope, a glossary, room for diagrams), plus what was missing (goals and metrics, non-goals, user stories with acceptance criteria and priority, a dependencies table with an owner column, and a risks/open-questions section that gives an unresolved question a place to live instead of a Slack thread).

**\[Download: PRD Template — [Developer-Friendly Edition (.docx)](https://nyeinchanaung.me/hubfs/sources/PRD-Template-Developer-Friendly.docx)\]**

And because a blank template only shows half the point, I also rewrote the actual ShweBo Trace PRD into this structure — same real project, same real assumptions and rules, restructured so you can see exactly what changed and why. Nothing about the product's scope is different from the original; what's different is that a developer could now build several of its core flows straight from the acceptance criteria without asking me anything first.

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