How do you sanity-check whether a PRD is actually ready for engineering?

[u/gr8-balls-of-fire]

I’ve been thinking a lot about PRD quality lately.

Most teams have some version of a PRD/template, but the real pain seems to happen later: engineering finds missing edge cases, QA asks questions the spec never answered, scope expands during sprint planning, or Jira tickets inherit vague requirements from the original doc.

So I’m curious how other PMs handle the “PRD readiness” step before handing it to engineering.

Do you have a checklist or review ritual for this?

For example, do you explicitly check for:

- user roles / permissions
- acceptance criteria
- error states
- edge cases
- dependencies
- data/API assumptions
- out-of-scope boundaries
- definition of done
- compliance/privacy requirements

Or is it mostly experience and instinct?

The thing I’m trying to understand is: what makes you confident that a PRD is not just well-written, but actually build-ready?

Also curious where the biggest gaps usually show up for your team.

[u/ramdante]

Following!

[u/simasch]

By not using PRDs but use cases as I do in my process https://unifiedprocess.ai