Five (surprisingly simple) ways to escape endless PRD iterations
Not a comprehensive guide to writing PRDs—just focused strategies to help you align and build faster.
I’ve written and reviewed many Business Requirements Documents (PRDs)—some crisp and clear, many bloated and vague. I frequently find teams stuck in PRD iterations for months, thinking more refinements will ensure a better product. Unfortunately, more time spent writing a PRD does not guarantee a better product—only a delayed one.
🕰️ The 40-hour rule
To escape the trap of endless PRD iterations, I follow a simple 40-hour rule of thumb: If writing your PRD takes more than 40 hours of active effort from start to finish, something is probably broken. That includes time spent understanding the current state, interviewing customers, clarifying requirements with engineers, iterating on feedback, and getting stakeholder sign-off.
40 hours of active time does not mean one week of calendar time. Realistically, you will not have instant access to customers or stakeholders, and you might not be able to spend all 40 hours in a week on a single focused task. So your requirements gathering and alignment may be spread out across multiple weeks of calendar time. But strive to move fast.
How? Keep reading...
And before you wonder if LLMs that can write PRDs in seconds make this advice obsolete—they don't. If anything, these insights are even more valuable in a world where AI can quickly generate impressive-looking documents that are barely more than well-formatted noise.
⚡ How to write a better PRD, faster
In my experience, endless PRD iterations stem from five gaps:
Teams use PRDs as a replacement for strategic alignment on what problem is worth solving and why.
Teams start with a very broad scope, trying to solve world hunger with a single PRD.
Teams lack clarity on current and future end-to-end process.
PMs only consider customer or operational processes, missing system and data flows entirely.
PMs keep iterating based on vague feedback, without understanding what clarity is needed to unblock critical decisions.
Here are some strategies to tackle these gaps:
1. Start writing the PRD after, not before, you’ve already aligned on what customer problem to solve
A PRD isn’t where you explore which problem to solve, make your business case, get executive alignment, or solve unclear strategy via endless stakeholder meetings. All of that should happen before you start the PRD.
The goal of a PRD is to inform and unblock design and development—not drive to upstream strategic alignment.
2. Start with a focused scope
If you're trying to solve too many problems at once, stop! A PRD that tries to solve more than one coherent set of related problems will either collapse under its own weight—or solve nothing well. Break down a larger product into multiple focused, solvable chunks, and tackle each separately. Then, for the specific problem you're trying to solve:
List all the customer personas your product will interact with. Your customers can be end consumers, but they can also be businesses, internal customers like marketing or business teams, warehouse operators, analytics teams, etc.
List the specific set of problems you're solving for each customer persona through this PRD. In thinking about customer problems, apply the "jobs to be done" framework—describing what job the customer is trying to get done.
3. Use structured end-to-end thinking to drive clarity
Mapping the end-to-end journey is one of the most powerful (and underused) techniques in writing a great PRD:
Describe (or sketch out) the end-to-end process the customer is using to solve problems in question today.
Describe (or sketch out) the end-to-end process in your proposed future solution. Don’t limit yourself to a minimum viable or lovable product just yet. Stay realistic (e.g., don't incorporate a time machine into your proposed solution). But also don’t constrain your requirements artificially (e.g., do not introduce manual workarounds at each step just yet).
Without these end-to-end maps, your PRD is just well-formatted noise.
4. Don't just stop at customer journeys
Map out the entire journey from start to finish — across four dimensions:
👤 Customer journey (what customers see and do at each step)
⚙️ Operational process (what operational processes happen at each step)
🖥️ System flow (what is triggered and orchestrated at each step)
📊 Data flow (what is computed, tracked, or passed at each step)
Most PMs stop at the customer journey or the operational process. But if you’re not mapping the system and data flows—you’re missing half the story, guaranteeing endless iterations and expensive misses.
Example 1: In thinking about an ecommerce checkout flow, you obviously need to consider the customer journey (e.g., allowing customers to discover a product, add to cart, add their address, select a delivery option after seeing delivery fees, add payment, click complete checkout, etc.). But you also need to consider the system flow (e.g., fetch delivery options when customer enters address, reserve inventory when customer clicks complete checkout, etc.) and the data flow (e.g., log metrics to track detailed conversion funnel).
Example 2: In thinking about an ordering system that a brand uses to place purchase orders (PO) with their manufacturers, you obviously need to consider the customer and operational flows (e.g., manufacturer gets a PO that tells them how many units of each product to manufacture, manufacturer can book shipment once units are ready, manufacturer can drop inventory at desired location and get paid, etc.). But you also need to consider the system and data flows (e.g., what data do you need to compute order quantity, where do you get this data from, what system is tracking current inventory levels, etc.).
Systematically considering these system and data interactions upfront will set you apart as a technical product manager, and avoid misses in tech design and development timelines.
5. Force specificity in stakeholder feedback
The most common and fatal mistake I see is accepting vague stakeholder feedback. Too often, PMs iterate on the PRD blindly, because they’re told something is missing or unclear. But they never stop to ask what specifically is unclear.
Your engineering team is using the PRD to inform critical design decisions that are hard to reverse. When they ask for further clarity on requirements, try to understand: What specific design decision is blocked? What specific questions need answering to unblock it? To be a more effective PM, build and flex this muscle consistently, ensuring you iterate for clarity, not for polish.
Without a list of targeted questions that need answering, you will spend endless iterations chasing clarity on things that do not unblock anything, frustrating both your engineering partners and yourself.
🤖 Why these insights matter with AI
In an LLM-first world, these insights become your competitive edge and your best defense against endless AI-assisted rewrites.
Endless PRD iterations usually stem from unclear strategy, broad scope, missing end-to-end thinking, incomplete process mapping, and vague stakeholder feedback.
LLMs might exacerbate some of these problems by quickly generating a 50-page PRD that looks comprehensive, but still lacks a clear strategy and structured thinking.
Mapping all four dimensions (customer, operational, system, data) remains critical because LLMs are great at generating customer journey narratives, but they can't (yet) understand your current tech stack, or map your existing data pipelines.
Forcing specificity in stakeholder feedback becomes more critical because LLMs make it frictionless and even more tempting to iterate based on vague feedback—you might feel you're making progress, when you're just iterating faster toward the same unclear outcome.
💬 TL;DR
To avoid endless iterations on your PRD:
Work backwards from clearly defined and focused customer problems.
Map out end-to-end journeys for current and future solutions across customer, operational, system, and data dimensions.
Get specific about which questions unblock critical design decisions.
Most PRDs aren't slow because they're complex—they're slow because they're vague. Get specific. Get moving.
PS: Some enterprise products or regulated industries may require deeper discovery, validation, or compliance reviews, making the 40-hour rule less applicable. But even in those environments, structured end-to-end thinking and focused iteration will still help you move faster—with less thrash.