Product Requirements
This section shows how to use AI to create functional artefacts for your project. Product requirements are necessary for AI Coding Assistants (AICA) to deliver high quality code.
These are flexible guidelines rather than a specific workflow - adapt the techniques based on your situation and requirements.
Start With Your Feature Description
You will get the best outcomes from AI by first clearly articulating the requirement in your own words.
Create a comprehensive markdown document describing the feature you want to implement. Include these elements where relevant:
- Purpose and scope - What are we going to do?
- User interactions - How will people use this feature?
- Frontend requirements - Interface elements, user flows and visual design needs
- Backend requirements - Processing logic, data handling and system behaviour
- Data considerations - What information you’ll store, process or display
- Business rules - Constraints, validations and compliance requirements
- Integration points - How this connects with existing systems
- Performance expectations - Speed, capacity and reliability requirements
- Security requirements - Authentication, authorisation and data protection needs
Write with detail and clarity about what you want - this clarifies your own thinking and expectations of what is to be generated, and it forms the foundation for AI-generated artefacts.
Example Feature Description
I'm creating a governance checklist app for Defra governance project tracking. Here are the features of the app:
- This tool allows projects to track their governance process through a unified checklist, composed of multiple governance workflows, each with their own checklist items.
- There can be multiple governance workflows of checklist items, such as a main governance flow, then sub-flows depending on what part of the business you're delivering for.
- The checklist items are general, but should be able to support these types - labels are examples: 'approval' (where the checklist item requires somebody to upload a document as evidence of the approval and state the person, date/time of the approval when checking off), 'document' (where the user must upload the latest version of the document before checking off). I guess 'approval' items also have 'document' item aspects to it, so it's likely they are just two additional types of a normal checklist item (without any states), 'event' could be another type.
- A checklist item should have states (example labels): 'incomplete', 'complete', 'not required'.
...and so on...
Create Visual Mockups
For user-facing features, develop mockups using Figma, Miro or similar tools. Add clear annotations explaining expected behaviours, user flows and interaction patterns.
Why this matters: Visual references help AI tools understand your interface requirements and generate more accurate implementations. Include:
- Key user journeys and decision points
- Error states and edge cases
- Responsive behaviour for different screen sizes
- Accessibility considerations
You can use prompt-user-interface-requirements in an AI Assistant to create a text description of the interface that can then be used with the language model when you do code generation.
Generate User Stories Using AI
When your situation requires user stories, use prompt-user-story-creation in an AI Assistant to create a detailed story with acceptance criteria. Refine through iterative conversation.
Generate PRD Using AI
When your situation requires formal documentation, for example a new epic, use AI Assistants to generate Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) containing requirements, features and user stories together using prompt-combined-requirements-features-stories. Refine through iterative conversation.
