How to write a PRD?

This is a PRD which I wrote as an activity at Upraised.

BACKGROUND

The company I have chosen is Pratilipi. Pratilipi is a product which serves Indian writers and readers. Here writers can write stories, novels, comics, articles and other forms of literature in more than 10 Indian vernacular languages. This is a true product made for the next billion internet users.

Most of the users prefer to read in their own regional languages. Readers have the option to read thousands of hours of content on the platform. There are some books which are popular and other are user generated content.

Pratilipi also pays the writers some money depending on the popularities of their content. Pratilipi also facilitates a way for the users to pay money to their favorite authors.

Pratilipi app.

THE FEATURE

After doing extensive prioritization on various problems and solutions, I arrived at this.

If you need to know a bit more about prioritization, here is a great guide by me 👇

A guide on Prioritization for Product Managers

The feature is to enable users to be able to listen to their stories. Although Pratilipi is an reading app but users have specifically asked this and it also makes sense. As users do more and more with their time, they are basically multi-tasking. YouTube, Spotify and other media apps are the best examples of this. Pratilipi also needs to capitalize on this.

PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS DOCUMENT

Here is the structure:

1. PROBLEM ALIGNMENT

• Background
• High-level problem definition
• How do we know that this is a real problem and worth solving?

2. SOLUTION ALIGNMENT

• Who are we building for?
• What does the solution look like?
• Touchpoints
• How do we know that we have solved the problem?
• Go to market strategy
• Additional supporting features
• Resources Required
• Deliverables for the Engineers
• Timelines
• Further Communication

Here is the final document.

PROBLEM ALIGNMENT

Background

Reading is not always possible. There are many situations in life where users cannot read while driving, working out or doing something else. As life becomes more and more fast-paced users are moving towards doing multiple things at once. So, reading is one thing which requires a lot of focus as compared to other activities.

Therefore Pratilipi needs to solve this problem where users have the freedom to use Pratilipi while doing other things simultaneously.

High-level problem definition

As we have seen from the Play Store reviews that users are not happy with the limited ways to consume the reading material. The most often complaint that the users have is that: they are not always in situations where they can open the app and start reading their favourite stories.

There are a few reasons for these problems.

High-paced life

Users nowadays are doing multiple things at once and most of the time, the activity that gets added is some form of content. Be it music, podcast or a video. And all these forms of content come with a background play option. Consider the likes of Spotify, Youtube premium, YT music and scores of other media apps which provide background playing.

We can see this getting implemented in many browsers where there is a reader mode where there’s a voice that narrates the contents of the page.

Reading is becoming the uncool version of content consumption

More and more people are interested in watching or listening to content. So there is a shift in consumption pattern and therefore this has become a problem in most of the cases where users demand a more leisure form of content creation.

How do we know that this is a real problem and worth solving?

We have seen from a lot of play store reviews that users want to listen to stories on Pratilipi as they are not always in an environment where they can read.

SOLUTION ALIGNMENT

Who are we building for?

This feature is basically for the ‘Leisure Enthusiast Readers’ user personas. These users are always looking for quality reading content just to learn something or keep themselves engaged. In the vernacular language category, Pratilipi provides best in class options. So, for the readers who want unlimited remain engaged to all these stories then Pratilipi does the job.

JBTD: Access stories with freedom.

Solution: Pratilipi reader

What does the solution look like?

How will the user use the text to speech feature?

Users can choose to listen to the stories on the content description page or on the actual story page as shown in the mockup below.

Users will also have the option to control the media from the notifications and the lock screen too. This will be similar to the consumption of video or music.

While listening to the stories users can also choose the voice from different types of voices( Gender, ethnicity). Initially, users will be able to control the audio based on the chapters and then they can also control the speed of narration.

Mock up of the solution

Touchpoints

For the users to see the controls of their streams they can either reach them from the Summary pages or the main story page.

Here are the touchpoints that we should focus on.

1. Notifications: When users would want to change the media set from the Notifications.
2. Lock Screen: If users are listening to a story and they want to control their stream from the lock screen.
3. Summary pages: For each story, users will get an option to continue from the last time they listened to that story.
4. Story page: While reading a story, if the user suddenly feels that they need to stream this, they can play that story from the story page.

How do we know that we have solved the problem?

As this is a new feature we are looking mostly for the impact of the feature. So, we need to see if users are using it or not. This feature is not meant to use all the time as Pratilipi is used for reading user-generated content. But considering that users will be busy most of the time the day and if they are using it during those times where they can’t read the stories, then we can measure the impact of this feature.

Ideally, users should be using this feature 20% of all the time they are using the apps.

Some of the times when users are busy in other activities and still use the app are

1. Working out (Early morning, evening)
2. During travelling, commuting
3. Sleeping/late night

Core Success Metric

1. % of time used during the busy times

North Star Metric (NSM)

1. Positive % change in listening time

Qualitative Metrics

1. Positive Play store reviews
2. High NPS score

Other Miscellaneous metrics

1. The number of premium stories read by the users: Core Action- Ideally should Increase
2. Total time spent without listening vs total time spent listening.

Go to market strategy

Create a few banner ads inside the app to let the users know about the new feature in the latest update.

The following is the go-to-market strategy

1. In the beginning, the feature will only be implemented in the premium stories.
2. Then we will see how it is performing among the paid users.
3. If we see a higher adoption rate then we can keep this feature limited only to paid users and if not we will release it to all the users.
4. Track the metrics
5. Look at the reviews from the surveys and then reiterate the changes.

Additional supporting features

These are some of the additional supporting features which will help the users to use the feature better.

Different voices

• Based on languages users will have a few options in choosing a voice that they want the story to be narrated in.

Offline saving of the listening feature

• Users can save the audio file for listening offline to the stories without requiring the internet.

Resources Required

1. SDE — 2
2. Quality Assurance — 1
3. Designers — 2
4. Marketing Team
5. Analytics and Data Science — 1

Deliverables for the Engineers

Here are the most important aspects of the feature that engineers need to focus on.

☝ Please refer to the mockups that were made in the previous section of this document.

1. Notifications on the notification bar and lock screen
2. Media player controls inside the app
3. On the summary page
4. On the main story page

Timelines

Further Communication

Further communication will be done via company channels of Slack and other services. If you have a doubt please reach out to me or comment on this Notion page.

That’s it for the document. Here is the actual Notion file. If you have any questions, do comment and follow me on twitter for more!

Text to speech conversion for listening to the stories on Pratilipi