PKB-Driven Development 1: Product Knowledgebase-Driven Development
Part of the PKB-Driven Development Series
In most organizations, requirements are written into work items, consumed by teams, and then discarded. This leads to duplicated effort, forgotten decisions, and fragile implementations that break under change. Without a single authoritative knowledgebase, teams rely on tribal knowledge and reverse engineering instead of clarity and confidence.
PKBDD 1 is a foundational transformation step. It introduces the behaviors and systems needed to stop the chaos and start managing product knowledge intentionally. This program doesn’t assume perfect structure or maturity — it simply begins the shift from ephemeral Jira tickets to persistent, versioned requirements owned by Product.
PKB-Driven Development 1 (PKBDD 1) solves this by turning your requirements into persistent, version-controlled assets stored in a Product Knowledgebase (PKB). It’s the foundation for traceable development, strong cross-role alignment, and sustainable product evolution.
“You can’t improve your delivery if your requirements disappear every Sprint.”
What You’ll Gain from PKBDD 1
PKBDD 1 introduces a foundational capability most teams lack: managing requirements as long-lived business assets that guide all implementation efforts.
Through guided practice, your team will:
- Organize requirements in a consistent, centralized structure to avoid scattered or siloed documentation1
- Version and govern requirements to prevent knowledge loss and rework
- Link requirements to work without embedding them in tickets
- Enable traceability and transparency across roles
- Support other practices that benefit from well-authored, traceable requirements — including readiness criteria (RMF 3), bespoke definitions of done (RMF 2), and behavioral specifications (BDD)
Program Details
Delivery Format: One full day of training, followed by coaching and evaluation over 1–2 sprints.
Participants
PKB-Driven Development is a foundational practice owned by the Product Management division. This program is designed for individuals and leaders who create, maintain, or influence the way product requirements are captured, structured, and stored.
| Required | Product managers, product owners, business analysts, and product management leadership |
| Strongly Encouraged | Technical product managers, capability managers, and process owners or transformation leads who influence requirement structure, authoring responsibilities, or tool integrations |
| Optional | Engineers or testers who contribute to unit-level requirement authoring or consume requirements from the PKB |
Activities You’ll Complete in PKBDD 1
These hands-on activities will help your team build and begin using a structured, version-controlled PKB as their primary requirements repository.
| Training | PKBDD 1 course |
| Coaching | Support for PKB setup, versioning, linking, and use during sprint work |
| Evaluation | Competency evaluated using the PKBDD 1 Evaluation Worksheet |
| Certification | Requirements authors become certified in PKBDD 1 once they demonstrate consistent application of the core practices taught in the program. |
Participation in Meetings
The PKBDD 1 coach will work with your team’s requirements authors for 2 full days over the course of 6 weeks/3 two-week Sprints to support adoption of PKBDD 1 practices, during which the coach will:
- Participate in backlog refinement and Sprint Planning to guide integration of PKB usage
- Support bidirectional linking between PKB specifications and work items — ensuring that each work item references the correct specification version, and that specifications record which work item was used to implement it
Capacity Impact
| Sprint 1 | 1 day of training, <½ day impact from coaching2 |
| Sprint 2 | <½ day impact from coaching2 |
| Sprint 3 | <½ day impact from coaching2 |
Prerequisites
none
Enablers
Footnotes
1 Capability-based structuring is introduced as an advanced pattern in follow-on programs, but is not required for initial PKBDD adoption.
2 While most of the work introduced by PKBDD 1 is work the requirements authors would need to do anyway, there may be a small impact on their capacity due to initial training and setup. As they become proficient, this impact becomes negligible.
3 Requirements Maturation Flow helps ensure PKB-authored requirements are well-understood, complete, and ready for implementation.
