Workflow PRD to Production

Workflow: PRD to Production

The outer engineering loop. Takes a feature from "idea worth doing" to "live in production with stable metrics." Composes every artifact SpecRoute produces.

For the canonical version, see workflows/prd-to-production.md.

The 13 stages

1. PRD draft       → 2. PRD review     → 3. PRD approved
                                              │
                                              ▼
4. Spec triplet draft → 5. Spec review → 6. Spec approved
                                              │
                                              ▼
7. Implementation tasks → 8. Implementation → 9. PR review
                                              │
                                              ▼
10. Validation     → 11. Rollout       → 12. Production stable → 13. Closeout

Each stage has an entry condition, an output, and an exit gate.

Stage summaries

1. PRD draft

Owner: product / sponsor (with prd-author agent). Output: prds/active/<slug>.md with Status: Draft. Exit: every section has at least placeholder content; open questions listed; success metrics concrete.

2. PRD review

Owner: product owner + stakeholders (eng, ops, security, compliance). Exit: open questions resolved or assigned owner + date; stakeholders sign off.

3. PRD approved

Output: Status: Approved. The PRD is now the contract.

4. Spec triplet draft

Owner: tech lead (with spec-author agent). Use prompts/shared/prd-to-spec-prompt.md. Output: specs/<slug>/{requirements,design,tasks}.md with stable IDs, back-refs, populated coverage table. Exit: every PRD acceptance criterion maps to ≥1 requirement; every requirement maps to ≥1 task; coverage table has no TODO rows.

5. Spec review

Owner: tech lead, architect, security reviewer. Exit: open design questions resolved; design doesn't introduce risks the PRD doesn't mention.

6. Spec approved

Output: each of requirements.md, design.md, tasks.md has Status: Approved.

7. Implementation tasks

Owner: tech lead (with prompt-engineer agent if many tasks). Output: agent-roster.md + (for multi-week initiatives) prompts/000_GLOBAL_MASTER.md and numbered task prompts under prompts/phase{N}_<name>/; an implementation-plan.md. Exit: every task in tasks.md has a primary agent assigned; implementation plan has a defensible schedule.

8. Implementation

Owner: each task's primary agent. Output: code, tests, observability, doc updates. Each task back-references requirement IDs in commits and PRs. Exit: each task's checkbox is checked; PR is open.

See Workflow Spec to Implementation for the inner loop.

9. PR review

Owner: code reviewer (human or code-reviewer agent). Use: prompts/shared/code-review-prompt.md. Exit: approval; tests pass; /audit clean; sanitization gate doesn't fire.

See Workflow Agent Review Loop.

10. Validation

Owner: QA / test engineer + template-quality-reviewer agent for cross-cutting checks. Output: validation report. Every requirement has a passing test; every NFR is measured; performance budgets met. Exit: validation report clean.

See Workflow Testing and Validation.

11. Rollout

Owner: deployment / SRE. Output: production deployment per the PRD's rollout strategy (typically feature flag → 10% → 50% → 100% with monitoring at each stage). Exit: 100% traffic with stable error rates and latency for the duration specified in the PRD.

See Workflow Release Readiness.

12. Production stable

Owner: deployment / SRE → product. Exit: every PRD acceptance criterion checked; success metrics within target.

13. Closeout

Owner: PRD author. Output: PRD Shipped + moved to prds/archive/; spec triplet Complete; lessons-learned doc; any deferred work surfaces as new PRDs.

Skipping stages

For trivial work, some stages collapse:

• Lightweight feature — Stages 4–6 use feature-spec-template.md instead of the spec triplet.
• Refactor with no behavior change — skip the PRD; use technical-spec-template.md starting at Stage 4.
• One architectural decision — use the ADR template only.

Don't skip Stages 9 (review), 10 (validation), or 11 (rollout). Those are the gate.

Roles map

Stage	Primary role	Agent (if delegating)
1 — PRD draft	Product owner	prd-author
2 — PRD review	Stakeholders	(review prompt)
4 — Spec triplet	Tech lead	spec-author
7 — Tasks + prompts	Tech lead	prompt-engineer
8 — Implementation	Each task's owner	(per task assignment)
9 — PR review	Reviewer	code-reviewer
10 — Validation	QA	template-quality-reviewer
11 — Rollout	SRE	deployment-validator

Worked example

The canonical example walks this entire workflow for the user-search feature. See Worked Example.

See also

• Workflow Spec to Implementation — Stages 7–9 in detail
• Workflow Agent Review Loop — Stage 9
• Workflow Testing and Validation — Stage 10
• Workflow Release Readiness — Stage 11
• Spec-Driven Development — the philosophy