Use AI to reframe that old PRD your boss just sent you

Most product managers have encountered this. Leadership asks you to revive a shelved initiative, and you find the original product requirements document. The goals are outdated, the user personas no longer match your current segments, and no one remembers why it was deprioritized. The obvious answer? Start fresh. But legacy PRDs often contain real value: customer interview quotes, competitive analysis, or technical constraints that would be expensive to research again.

With the right AI tools and prompts, you can turn old docs into relevant, actionable input for today's product work.

First, a quick note on the different types of requirements documents you might encounter. Some teams maintain high-level PRDs in Aha! Knowledge to capture the core functionality needed for a Minimum Lovable Product. These evolve throughout the product lifecycle as collaborative documents. Other PRDs are written at the initiative, epic, release, or feature level and are stored as records in Aha! Roadmaps rather than as standalone documents.

This post is relevant to both types, since the AI techniques work whether you are dealing with strategic documents or tactical feature specs. The prompts we share below help you extract value regardless of where your requirements live or how they are structured.

AI can help you mine old PRDs in ways that manual review never could — quickly scanning long documents, surfacing patterns, and reframing outdated content against today's goals. Pair that speed with your own product judgment, and you can extract what is still useful without redoing the original work.

Use the AI assistant in Aha! software to quickly summarize and extract key insights from old PRDs.

With that in mind, here are 15 sample AI prompts centered on PRDs that you can put to work. They are grouped into four categories — strategize, summarize, analyze, and reframe — so you can quickly zero in on the type of help you need. Use them as a starting point, then adapt them to your own workflows.

Strategize

Give these instructions to determine how closely your PRDs align with the current strategy:

• "Compare the user personas mentioned here with our current customer segments, and flag any major differences."

• "Suggest measurable success metrics for this epic that tie back to our strategic goals."

• "Based on our current strategic priorities, identify which requirements from this document still make sense and which need updating."

Summarize

Consider the following AI prompts to quickly summarize old PRDs. This is especially useful if the PRDs are long or you have multiple documents:

• "Extract all customer interview quotes and pain points mentioned in these requirements. Then, group them by theme."

• "Summarize the technical constraints and dependencies outlined here. Flag any that may no longer apply given our current platform."

• "Pull out the top three user workflow problems identified in the document. For each, tell me which stage of the customer journey it would most likely impact."

Analyze

Try these prompts to deeply analyze the content within the PRDs, looking for specific keywords or topics that are relevant to the company or team today:

• "Identify which features align with our current company objectives and which were based on outdated assumptions."

• "Compare the competitive landscape described here with what we know about the market today. What has changed?"

• "Turn these old requirements into user stories with acceptance criteria that reflect our current development standards."

• "Identify any conflicting requirements or contradictions in this document."

Reframe

Instruct AI to rewrite or refocus the content in the PRDs to align with existing company goals and customer needs:

• "Rewrite this problem statement to clearly connect with our current goals."

• "Translate these technical requirements into plain language for stakeholder review."

• "Create a one-paragraph summary of this PRD that focuses on business value and customer impact.

• "Compare this PRD draft with the PRDs for related epics. What dependencies or conflicts might exist?"

Remember that AI output needs your validation — AI highlights what to examine and suggests connections, but you still need to verify the insights apply to your current context.

These prompts are starting points. Try the ones that resonate, modify the ones that do not, and begin building your own library.

Old PRDs do not have to be sources of clutter or confusion. With the right AI tools and prompts, you can resurface quotes, competitive notes, and technical details that still matter. And instead of starting from scratch, you can reclaim what is relevant and link it to today's priorities.

Legacy docs can inform future progress if you know how to interrogate them. AI accelerates that interrogation, leaving you with more time for judgment and decision-making. These parts of product management cannot be automated.

Want to go further? Explore our new AI prompt library, featuring 30+ proven prompts our team uses every day — from analyzing feedback to defining features.

Ready to get started? Learn more about the Aha! AI assistant and build better products, faster.