What is MRD? Market Requirements Document

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I’m making a quick post today to define the term MRD – Market Requirements Document. I’m often asked about it, now I can just point everyone to this blog post!

Definition of MRD: Market Requirements Document

MRD is a document that is usually written by a Product Marketing Manager or a Product Manager. This document defines the high-level market requirements for a product or project. (See Types of Software Requirements for a list of various types of requirements).

An MRD usually contains the following information:

• Executive Summary
• Vision
• Target Market
• Competitive Positioning
• List of Features
  • Derived from market needs
  • Prioritized based on ROI

The following teams usually “consume” (i.e. read) the MRD:

• Business Analysis
• Engineering
• UI design
• Marketing
• Sales
• Executives

Don’t make this mistake!
Sometimes, people refer to MRD as “Marketing Requirements Document” (note the extra “ing”). Perhaps this is because it comes from the “Marketing” department. But “Market Requirements Document” is a better definition, as this is a document that contains market requirements.

MRD vs PRD

At many companies, the MRD is used to create another document – the Product Requirements Document (PRD). PRD is then used by Engineering and QA teams to build the product.

At some companies MRD and PRD are combined into one document. In this scenario, the MRD also contains the following information:

• Use Cases (Functional Requirements)
• Non-functional Requirements (Such as Security, Performance, Scalability, etc)
• Requirements are also prioritized

Further reading: I wrote a post on my old blog that covers the distinction between MRD and PRD in more detail. Plus, check out the following post for a list of various types of requirements documents. This will help me avoid repeating that info here in a redundant and repetitive fashion! 😉

FYI: Accompa Requirements Management Software can help you automatically create MRD and PRD for your project. This can save you a lot of time over manually creating them. Check out product tour or request free trial.

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Michael Shrivathsan

I'm your author, Michael Shrivathsan, an expert in product management with successful experience at several innovative companies in Silicon Valley, USA over the past two decades. I'm also a USPTO patent recipient. For my day job, I'm the VP of Product Management at Accompa, we make the popular requirements management software used by Product Management, Business Analysis, and related teams.

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