PRD vs BRD: product requirements vs business requirements

A BRD (Business Requirements Document) states the business problem and what success looks like for the business. A PRD (Product Requirements Document) is the product's answer — the users, the solution, the features that will actually move those business goals.

The BRD is written from the business's point of view; the PRD is written from the user's. That shift in perspective is the whole point of having two documents.

	BRD	PRD
Point of view	The business	The user
Answers	What does the business need, and why	What product solves it, for whom
Contains	Goals, scope, success metrics	Problem, personas, vision, features, requirements
Owned by	Business owner / sponsor	Product manager / founder
Comes	First	Second, from the BRD

Order and overlap

The BRD comes first and the PRD answers it. On a small team — or a solo founder — the two often merge: you hold the business goals in your head (or a Living Plan) and go straight to the PRD. That's fine, as long as the PRD's features actually trace back to a business goal and aren't just a wish list.

The failure mode is a PRD with no BRD behind it: a pile of features nobody can connect to a business outcome.

Keeping features tied to goals

Cadenly's Scope Refinement makes the BRD-level thinking explicit — it drafts business goals and aligns each requirement to the goals it serves, flagging anything that serves none. Then the PRD workflow turns that into the product solution. So even if you never write a formal BRD, every feature in the PRD is anchored to a goal.