When to Start and Finish Your MRD

Product Strategy

Your product roadmap describes the products that you intend to develop and bring to market over time.  Each product on the roadmap needs a Market Requirements Document (MRD). That MRD needs to be done sufficiently ahead of planned market introduction to allow for product development. Depending on the expected product development time, your MRD could be due two or more years before the product’s planned market introduction.

To hit the due date, you need to start early enough. Your MRD development process will include at least one iteration of the following two steps before submitting it for approval.

  1. Draft/Revise
  2. Voice-of-the-customer market validation

The time it takes to go through each cycle and the number of cycles required varies widely. Simple product extensions for already served markets might take just a few months. Whereas, MRD’s for new markets, new application requirements, or step-function, capability improvements might take a year or more. See the figure below for an example MRD, development timeline.

When to write an MRD
When to write an MRD