A requirements prompt is most useful when ideas are plentiful but phrased loosely: a meeting ends with everyone saying "add an export" or "a reminder would be nice", yet nothing on paper is concrete enough to build. Paste your meeting notes, chat logs, or your own spoken ideas into the prompt below exactly as they are. The AI first restates its understanding, then splits everything into requirement items with acceptance criteria, and finally lists whatever you left unclear as questions for you to answer instead of inventing answers.
Copy-and-paste prompt
You are a product manager with 8 years of experience in B2B products, skilled at breaking vague ideas into buildable requirements. Turn my scattered description below into a requirements list.
My raw description:
[Paste meeting notes, chat transcripts, or your own spoken ideas here exactly as they are; the messier the better, no need to tidy up first]
Product background: [Product name] is a [product type] for [target users], and the biggest pain right now is [core pain point].
Goal for this round: [e.g. ship by the end of this month, prioritizing retention of paying users]
Explicitly out of scope: [e.g. no changes to the payment flow, no mobile adaptation; write "none" if there is nothing]
Work through these 5 steps in order, do not skip any:
1. Restate the core requirement you understood in one sentence. If my description contradicts itself, point out the contradiction instead of smoothing it over.
2. Split the requirements into independent items, one thing per item, and output a table with these columns: ID, requirement name, problem it solves, who uses it, acceptance criteria. Write acceptance criteria in the form "When ..., the system should ...".
3. Label each item with a priority: must-have (the goal fails without it), should-have (clearly improves the experience), nice-to-have (only if capacity remains), with one sentence of reasoning each.
4. Add a separate "open questions" section: wherever I was unclear and you would have to guess, list it as a question for me to answer. Do not invent numbers, dates, or owners.
5. Suggest a build order and state which item depends on which, explaining each dependency in one sentence.
Constraints: only organize what I provided; do not add features I never mentioned. Anything uncertain goes into the open questions, never into the requirement items.How to fill in the four variables
- [Raw description]: do not polish it. Voice transcripts and chat logs are fine. The rawer the material, the better the AI can tell real requirements from passing remarks. Below roughly 100 words the result drops off noticeably, so gather enough material first.
- [Core pain point]: describe the suffering, not the feature you want. Write "support agents manually export data three times a day to send to clients", not "we need an export feature".
- [Goal for this round]: include a deadline and a trade-off, such as "ship within two weeks, core flow only". The more concrete the goal, the more reliable the priorities.
- [Out of scope]: the easiest field to skip. Drawing the boundary early stops the AI from scheduling every passing idea into this round.
Follow-ups that make round two much better
Do not use the first output right away. Look at the open questions section first; that is the real deliverable of this pass. Answer each question in the same conversation, then add: "Using the information I just added, update the requirements table and mark which items changed priority." If an acceptance criterion is vague, with wording like "improve the user experience", follow up with: "Rewrite the acceptance criteria of item 2 as sentences that can be checked off one by one." With more than 15 items, add: "Group by must-have, should-have, and nice-to-have, sorted by build order within each group."
When not to expect a one-shot result
If the raw description never says who the users are, the AI can only produce a skeleton and the open questions will outnumber the requirements. That is normal: add the background and run a second round. Requirements involving pricing, contract terms, or compliance can only serve as a draft and must be reviewed item by item by the owner before scheduling. And the prompt only organizes what was actually said; a critical requirement nobody mentioned will not appear out of thin air. Asking every meeting participant to write down the one thing they care about most beforehand makes the result noticeably better.
