What is a Business Requirements Document (BRD) and when do you use one?
A BRD is a structured document capturing what a business needs a system or change to do, written before technical design begins — used at project initiation to align stakeholders on scope before architecture decisions are made.
Full Answer
A Business Requirements Document captures business objectives, scope, stakeholder needs, and numbered functional/non-functional requirements with acceptance criteria — all written from the business perspective, without prescribing a technical solution.
You use a BRD at the start of a system implementation, vendor selection, or regulatory-driven change, whenever multiple business units need to agree on scope before technical design or procurement begins. It is not appropriate for highly iterative Agile sprints, where lightweight user stories are the documented artefact instead.
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