Designing new software requires collaboration from many different stakeholders, such as managers, developers and engineers. A technical specification document helps facilitate communication and coordinate everyone’s efforts by outlining the project’s scope and requirements.

Writing technical specification documents involves a significant time investment—from drafting to collaborating with stakeholders. Luckily, you can streamline that process with tricks like starting with a template. 

Read on for helpful information about technical specification documents along with templates and best practices for creating them. 

What’s a Technical Specification Document?

A technical specifications document is an internal plan for developing a software product or feature. It describes the proposed product's functional and non-functional requirements, the development process’s and the stakeholders involved. 

This document is quite similar to a project plan. It includes the end product’s specifications and functionality with a roadmap for production. Engineers, developers and managers collaborate to create technical specification documents that describe the result they envision and break down its development process into achievable goals.

Importance of a Technical Specification Document

A technical specifications document ensures a shared understanding of development goals, preventing miscommunication and division within the team. Without it, differing interpretations can create friction.

Your specification document isn’t all you need to facilitate efficient cross collaboration, but it is essential. It serves as a central hub for information, goals and standards that everyone can refer to for a high-level perspective of the development process.

Another key feature of your technical specification document is linking to all the other resources teams need to do their work, such as standard operating procedures (SOPs), technical descriptions and training manuals. Since it already references all key components, this document serves as the ideal starting point for employees to access other necessary information.

Types of Technical Specification Documents

Technical specification documents are already a very specific type of planning documentation. However, people use several different terms to refer to them in various contexts. Here are the kinds of technical specification documents teams use:

• Technical design documents focus on a project’s design aspects. They still outline the functionalities developers need to create, but they prioritize describing how designers will use those features to design the software’s interface and user experience.
• Product reference documents (PRDs) provide a detailed summary of the requirements and specifications a product needs to meet before launch. After launch, it’s updated to describe the product’s current state and outline future goals.
• IT documents describe how IT teams plan to set up and maintain a network of software and hardware that’ll make a product work.
• Project scope documents are high-level blueprints for how managers intend to oversee a project’s journey toward completion.

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One thing all technical specification documents have in common is that process instructions make up a large portion of them. You’ll need to provide instructions for common procedures teams will perform, like assigning tasks, pushing changes and creating prototypes. Scribe can significantly reduce the time it takes to write them by automatically generating step-by-step instructions, complete with screenshots and helpful formatting.

How To Write Technical Specifications: 5 Steps

Writing technical specifications documents is a team effort. Project managers usually draft and maintain the document, but they lean on development teams and other stakeholders to fill in precise details and identify reasonable timelines. 

Here’s a process project managers can follow to create and finalize a technical specifications document.

1. Start With an Outline

An outline helps you identify all the high-level touchpoints your technical specifications document must cover. To give yourself a head start, choose a template from the list in the next section and repurpose it to suit your needs.

2. Describe Goals

Fill out each main section of your outline with the primary goals the teams should strive toward. Describe the milestones they’ll need to reach and list all the stakeholders and approvers involved in each process.

3. Meet With Stakeholders

Share what you have so far with everyone involved in the development process. Then, meet with each team separately to surface all the details the finished technical specifications document should include. Ask them for links to SOPs, asset libraries and anything else they use to do their job so you can centralize resources in the relevant sections. Then, establish a reasonable timeline for meeting each milestone and goal.

4. Define Strategies

Lay out the processes and communication platforms teams will use to complete their work on time. Set up regular meetings, establish cross-functional collaboration guidelines and polish the document to provide relevant, helpful information about how to contribute to the finished product.

5. Get Executive Buy-in

Present your technical specifications document to your executive team to get their approval on the timelines, requirements and goals you’ve outlined. If they have any feedback, coordinate with stakeholders to make the necessary changes and then resubmit the document.

3 Technical Specification Examples

The following templates are prime examples of what your technical specification documents should include. Use them to inspire, build and customize your own spec documentation.

1. Product Reference Document Example

This PRD presentation template offers a comprehensive outline for everything your technical specification documentation needs. It has headings to describe the product vision, the team involved in development and all the necessary requirements and components. It also includes several sections for providing relevant research like user personas and use cases. Including this information in your document helps teams better understand the target audience so they can calibrate their design decisions accordingly.

This template is a great starting point for your documentation. It offers over a dozen unique headings, but you might not need them all. Edit it as needed for your organizational requirements, and add anything you think will help everyone stay on track. When you find a version that works, save a blank copy for future projects.

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2. IT Documentation Template

This IT documentation template begins with a section listing basic details about the project so readers can quickly understand what they’re looking at. The rest of the document details the phases the project will move through. Each phase lists the team members involved and the intended timeline. The template provides some naming suggestions for these phases, but you can customize them as needed. 

3. Project Scope Document Template

Project scope documentation includes everything you need to plan and launch a software project. This template offers space to summarize the project, list all the necessary resources and outline essential milestones. It also includes a helpful section for listing deliverables teams need to produce, such as storyboards and prototypes.

This template is quite versatile as-is, and you can add new headings to refine it for your needs. For instance, you might add sections listing the stakeholders involved or detailing regulations teams must comply with. 

Fast-Track Your Documentation Efforts With Scribe

A template is a surefire way to get a headstart on your technical specification documentation, and following a proven creation process will help, too. To streamline things even further, you can offload this work to software documentation tools like Scribe. 

Process documentation makes up a significant portion of your tech spec docs, but Scribe can help you breeze through it. Scribe automatically generates process instructions for you as you complete tasks and turns them into embeddable documents that you can quickly drop into your documentation. This saves valuable time you would’ve spent painstakingly walking through processes, capturing screenshots and typing instructions. 

‍Try Scribe for free or read about the Documentation Generator tool to learn more.