Technical Specifications

Clear technical specs build trust and ensure everyone—from developers to users—aligns on what the product truly delivers.

Ceyhun Enki Aksan
Ceyhun Enki Aksan Entrepreneur, Maker

Throughout the lifecycle of a project, numerous features are evaluated.

Although most of these features are considered “nice to have,” core features remain fixed and undergo very little change. However, it is essential that core features are clearly understood by developers, customers, and end users in different contexts. This understanding enables the customer responsible for managing the product to grasp their expectations regarding the product, and also allows the end user or consumer to understand their specific needs. How, then, should technical features—along with the requirements associated with them—be evaluated in different scenarios?

Technical Features (Technical Specification / Tech Specs)

For an application and/or external hardware to function properly and perform its intended tasks (at a minimum planned level), certain requirements and dependencies must be defined in terms of minimum or recommended (ideal) technical requirements or system requirements1. These may include supported or required operating systems, runtimes, software development kits (SDKs), drivers, language versions, character sets, and encoding schemes for a software application. For a web application, requirements may include Node.js modules, browser compatibility, external CSS and JavaScript frameworks and libraries, among other dependencies2.

On the other hand, the features possessed by a product or application are specified under the heading of technical specifications as product technical specifications or more generally as product features3. For example, for a purchased laptop or smart phone, information such as screen (display), processor (processor), storage capacity (storage), memory (memory), graphics card (graphics), charging (charging), keyboard (keyboard), and camera (camera) are considered technical specifications of the product4.

Based on the above information, a developer implements the development environment, while the end user/consumer makes a purchase decision based on the specified features.

Technical specifications (tech spec) force you to think beyond complex issues and eliminate the need to assume everyone is on the same page.

This helps you avoid unnecessary time waste caused by dead-end solutions or incorrect decisions.

On Writing Tech Specs

Technical Specifications in Project Planning

As a result of evaluating the brief brief during the ideation phase, the project plan is developed, and during this period, expectations related to the end-product (delivered product) and the corresponding technical specifications are primarily defined under the design (design) phase.

DiscoveryDesignDevelopmentDeployment
Problems and goalsTarget audienceResearchSet up infrastructure
Functional features (functional specs)Technical specifications (technical specs)Project plan
Front-endBack-end
Test procedure (test procedure)TestTraining (education)Sales

This ensures that many decisions regarding the product’s (hardware or software) and/or service development environment become clear as it progresses from development to production, depending on its intended use and workload.

  • API integration completed: October 10
  • Q&A completed: October 21

During the product development process, milestones for the product/service to meet required technical specifications are defined. This process also includes stages such as wireframe, prototyping, and other related activities. After a detailed document is prepared, it is reviewed and evaluated jointly by all parties, scheduled, and approved. Project management tools and auxiliary tools such as teamgantt can be utilized during these processes.

Footnotes

  1. Specification (technical standard), Wikipedia
  2. On Writing Tech Specs
  3. How to Write Awesome Tech Specs
  4. How to Write a Technical Specification