What is a PRINCE2 product?

Understanding the concept of a PRINCE2 product can be one of the early challenges if you are quite new to PRINCE2. Comprehending what a PRINCE2 product truly is, is a necessity if you aspire to master the PRINCE2 project management method.

A PRINCE2 product can be anything produced in a project. A product is the same as a deliverable, and it includes everything made by the project manager and specialists throughout the project. Is someone writing a requirement document? That document is a PRINCE2 product. Is someone making a list of users to be training to use whatever you are building? Well, that list is a product.


The PRINCE2 definition of a product is “An input or output, whether tangible or intangible, that can be described in advance, created and tested”. PRINCE2 has two types of products:

• Management Products. This is what is produced to manage and control the project. The Project Brief, Project Initiation Document, Business Case and Project Plan are all examples of management Products.

• Specialist Products. This is what is made by specialists in the projects. It can be the functional requirement specification, a web design, the database model, the curriculum for user training, the CAD model, a module of the software to be made.

For every product in a PRINCE2 project, there is a Product Description. The PRINCE2 Product Description is a document describing the product’s purpose, composition, derivation and quality criteria.

One can easily be mislead to believe that a product is only the final main output of the project - the IT system going live or the new product shipping to customers, but that is only part of the story.

To make it really confusing, PRINCE2 is describing the final output of the project as PPD, Project Product Description, but that is a different story

Related Articles:
Warning: Product Description is not a Functional Requirement Specification
Does a Design Input Replace a PRINCE2 Product Description
PRINCE2 – Hierarchy of Requirements

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