Skip to content
AI Tools for PMs
← All recipes

A PRD first draft from a rough idea

A copy-paste prompt that turns three sentences of "we should build X" into a structured, reviewable PRD skeleton — with assumptions flagged and open questions surfaced instead of hidden.

Uses: Claude Writing PRDs & specs

What you’ll get

A complete PRD skeleton — problem, goals, non-goals, requirements, acceptance criteria, open questions — from a rough idea, in about ten minutes. The trick is a prompt that forces the model to mark its assumptions and ask questions rather than confidently inventing scope and metrics.

The prompt

Paste your rough idea where indicated, then paste this into Claude or ChatGPT:

You are an experienced product manager. Draft a PRD from the rough idea below.

Rough idea:
"""
<paste 2–5 sentences: what the feature is, who it's for, any hard constraints>
"""

Use exactly these sections:
1. Problem & context
2. Goals (outcomes, not features)
3. Non-goals
4. Requirements (user stories with acceptance criteria)
5. Risks & dependencies
6. Open questions

Rules:
- Wherever you make a guess I didn't give you, mark it inline as **[ASSUMPTION]**.
- Do NOT invent success metrics or numbers. If a metric is needed, add it to Open questions.
- Keep it tight. Prefer bullet points over prose.
- End with the 5 highest-leverage open questions, ranked.

Then do the human part

  1. Skim only the [ASSUMPTION] tags first — that’s where the draft is most likely wrong.
  2. Answer the ranked open questions in your own words.
  3. Reply: “Fold my answers below back into the PRD and remove the [ASSUMPTION] tags they resolve.”
  4. What’s left is a draft worth putting in front of eng and design. You spent your time on judgment, not formatting — which is the entire point of using AI here.