You've sketched your MVP idea on napkins, whiteboards, and probably a Figma file you shared with three people. Now you need to brief a development team, and someone just asked you for a "software requirements document." You know what you want to build, but turning that vision into a document that actually gets the right product built feels like translating poetry into assembly language.
A software requirements document for an MVP should include three core elements: a clear problem statement and success metrics, a prioritized feature list with user stories, and technical constraints including integrations and infrastructure needs. The goal is not exhaustive specification but shared understanding—enough detail that your dev team can build, test, and ship without constantly asking "what did you mean by this?" Most effective MVP requirements documents run 5-15 pages and take 8-12 hours to write properly.
The difference between a good requirements document and a mediocre one isn't length or formality. It's whether your developers can read it once and start building the right thing, or whether they'll need five clarification meetings before writing a single line of code.
Why Your MVP Needs a Requirements Document at All
Many founders skip documentation entirely, preferring to "stay agile" or communicate everything verbally. This works until your developer builds a beautiful user dashboard when you actually needed an admin panel, or implements OAuth login when you just needed email and password for the first 100 users.
The requirements document serves three purposes. First, it forces you to make decisions before they become expensive. Changing your mind in a document takes five minutes. Changing your mind after two weeks of development costs thousands of dollars and pushes your launch date. Second, it creates accountability—both for what you asked for and what the dev team committed to build. Third, it becomes your MVP scope guardian, the thing you point to when someone suggests "just one more quick feature."
For an MVP specifically, your requirements document should be opinionated about what you're not building. Every feature you exclude is runway you save and velocity you gain.
The Five Essential Sections of an MVP Requirements Document
Problem Statement and Success Definition
Start with the problem you're solving and for whom. Not the solution, the problem. Write 2-3 paragraphs that explain:
- Who experiences this problem specifically
- What they currently do to solve it and why that's inadequate
- What success looks like 90 days after launch
Be concrete. Instead of "small businesses struggle with invoicing," write "freelance designers billing 5-15 clients monthly spend 4-6 hours on invoice creation and payment follow-up using Google Docs and manual bank reconciliation."
Define 2-4 measurable success metrics. For an MVP, these are usually early-stage metrics like "50 users complete onboarding in first month" or "average session length above 8 minutes" rather than revenue targets. Your dev team needs to understand what you're optimizing for because it affects architectural decisions.
User Roles and Permissions
List every type of user who will interact with your system and what they can do. For most MVPs, this is simple:
- End users (the people who get value)
- Admins (you and your team managing the system)
- API consumers (if applicable)
For each role, specify authentication requirements. Does this MVP need social login, or is email/password sufficient? Do users need to verify their email before accessing features? Can users sign up themselves, or do you need to invite them?
Many MVPs over-engineer permissions. If you're launching to 50 beta users who are all paying customers, you probably don't need a granular role-based access control system. Document the simplest thing that could work.
Core Features as User Stories
This is the heart of your document. List features in priority order using this format:
As a [user role], I want to [action], so that [benefit].
Then add acceptance criteria—the specific, testable conditions that define "done." For example:
Feature: Project Creation As a freelance designer, I want to create a new project for each client, so that I can track work and expenses separately.
Acceptance criteria:
- User can create project with name, client name, and optional description
- User can set hourly rate per project (defaults to account-level rate)
- New projects appear in project list immediately
- User can create maximum 3 projects on free plan, unlimited on paid
Write 5-12 of these for your MVP. If you have more than 12 core features, you're not building an MVP—you're building a full product and calling it an MVP.
Explicitly list features you're excluding from v1. This seems counterintuitive, but it prevents scope creep. Write a "Not in MVP" section with features you've considered and rejected for the first version: team collaboration, mobile app, advanced reporting, whatever didn't make the cut.
Technical Requirements and Constraints
This section bridges your business needs with implementation reality. Include:
Required integrations: List third-party services your MVP must connect with. Stripe for payments, SendGrid for emails, whatever is non-negotiable. Include whether you have existing accounts or need new ones.
Data and infrastructure requirements: Specify if you have compliance needs (HIPAA, GDPR, SOC2). Note if you need multi-region deployment or if US-only is fine for the MVP. State expected user load honestly—don't say "must scale to millions" if you're targeting 200 beta users.
Browser and device support: Mobile-responsive web? Which browsers must work perfectly versus gracefully degrading? Native mobile apps, or web-only for v1?
Performance expectations: What's acceptable page load time? How quickly must the dashboard update? For most MVPs, "reasonably fast on decent internet" is sufficient, but if real-time updates or sub-second response times are core to the value proposition, specify that.
Design and User Experience Guidelines
You don't need pixel-perfect mockups for every screen, but you do need to communicate your UX expectations. Include:
- Links to any wireframes, mockups, or design files you've created
- Reference sites or apps with similar workflows ("onboarding flow similar to Notion")
- Brand assets: logo files, color hex codes, fonts
- Tone and voice guidelines if your product includes user-facing copy
Specify what you're providing versus what you expect the dev team to create. If you're handing off complete Figma designs, say that. If you're providing rough wireframes and expect the developer to make UI decisions, say that too. Misalignment here causes more project friction than almost anything else.
How Detailed Should Each Section Be?
The right level of detail for an MVP requirements document is "enough that a competent developer can build it without you in the room, but not so much that you've designed the database schema."
Specify the what and the why. Leave the how to your developers unless you have specific technical constraints. For example:
Too vague: "Users should be able to save their work."
Too prescriptive: "Implement auto-save using a debounced Redux action that commits to PostgreSQL every 3 seconds with optimistic UI updates and conflict resolution using last-write-wins strategy."
Just right: "Users should be able to save their work manually via Save button, with auto-save every 2-3 seconds when editing. Users should never lose more than a few seconds of work if their browser crashes."
The right specification gives your dev team the context to make good technical decisions while ensuring the user experience you envision.
When you're ready to turn your requirements into working software, Sindri specializes in building MVPs from clear requirements documents. We've shipped dozens of first versions for founders who know what they need but need an experienced team to build it fast and right.
Common Mistakes That Make Requirements Documents Useless
Writing for executives, not developers. Your requirements document will be read dozens of times by the people writing code. Skip the market analysis and competitive landscape. Those belong in your pitch deck, not your requirements doc.
Solving problems that don't exist yet. "We'll need to support 10 million users eventually" doesn't matter if you're trying to get your first 100. Build for the scale you'll reach in 6 months, not 6 years.
Describing the interface instead of the functionality. "There should be a blue button in the top right" is less useful than "Users need a quick way to create a new project from any screen." The first dictates a solution, the second describes the need.
Omitting unhappy paths. Document what happens when things go wrong. What displays if the user's payment fails? What happens if they try to upload a 500MB file? If an API call times out? Happy-path-only requirements lead to brittle software.
Using internal jargon without definitions. You might call them "projects" internally but if your industry calls them "campaigns" or "jobs," note that. Define acronyms. Your dev team isn't immersed in your domain.
Maintaining Your Requirements Document During Development
Your requirements document isn't write-once. Plan to update it as you learn from development.
Schedule a requirements review meeting at 25% completion and 75% completion. The first catches major misunderstandings early. The second confirms nothing got lost in implementation.
When requirements change mid-project (they will), update the document and mark changes with a date. This creates a paper trail: "Added 2026-06-15: users can now filter by date range" tells everyone this is new scope, not something that was missed.
Use your requirements document during QA and user testing. It's your checklist for "did we build what we said we'd build?" Test each acceptance criterion explicitly.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should a software requirements document be for an MVP?
An effective MVP requirements document typically runs 5-15 pages, which translates to 2000-6000 words. If yours is shorter than 5 pages, you're likely missing critical details that will lead to clarification meetings and rework. If it's longer than 15 pages, you're either building too much for an MVP or over-specifying implementation details that should be left to your development team. Focus on breadth of coverage across all essential sections rather than depth in any single area.
Do I need wireframes or mockups in my requirements document?
You need some form of visual representation for any screen users will interact with, but the fidelity depends on your design resources and how opinionated you are about UI. At minimum, include rough wireframes—even hand-drawn sketches photographed and inserted work better than text descriptions alone. If visual design and user experience are competitive differentiators for your product, invest in higher-fidelity mockups. If you're building a workflow tool where function trumps form, rough wireframes with annotations are sufficient.
Should technical architecture be included in an MVP requirements document?
Include technical constraints and requirements, not technical architecture. Specify that you need HIPAA compliance, or must integrate with Salesforce API, or need to support 500 concurrent users—these are constraints that affect architecture decisions. Don't specify whether to use PostgreSQL or MongoDB, microservices or monolith, REST or GraphQL unless you have specific technical reasons. Your development team should make architectural decisions based on the requirements you provide, their expertise, and what ships fastest.
How do I prioritize features when everything feels essential?
Use the "would users pay for this version" test. List all features, then remove one. Would someone still pay for what remains? Keep removing features one by one until you reach a version where removing anything else means nobody would pay. That's your MVP feature set. Another approach: categorize every feature as "must-have for launch," "should-have soon after," or "nice-to-have eventually." If more than 60% of features are must-haves, you're not being honest about priority. The hardest part of an MVP isn't building features—it's having the discipline not to build them.
What if my requirements change significantly during development?
Small changes are normal and should be documented as updates to your requirements. Significant changes—adding entire features, changing core user flows, or pivoting the fundamental value proposition—signal that you started development before validating your assumptions. If this happens, pause development, update your requirements completely, and have your dev team re-estimate timeline and cost based on the new scope. Trying to bolt major changes onto an in-progress MVP usually results in technical debt and a product that feels cobbled together. Sometimes the faster path is to restart with clear requirements.
From Document to Development
A well-crafted software requirements document transforms your MVP from a fuzzy vision into a buildable specification. It won't answer every question that emerges during development, but it should answer most of them.
The founders who ship fastest aren't the ones who skip documentation and "figure it out as they go." They're the ones who spend 8-12 focused hours writing clear requirements, then hand those requirements to a dev team that can execute without constant oversight. Your requirements document is an investment that pays dividends in reduced back-and-forth, fewer rewrites, and a shipped product that actually solves the problem you set out to solve.
Start with a blank document and the five sections outlined here. Block four hours on your calendar. Write the problem statement first—if you can't articulate the problem crisply, the solution won't matter. Then work through user roles, features, technical requirements, and design guidelines. You'll have a complete draft in one focused session, which you can refine over the next few days as you think of edge cases and clarifications.