While developing Star Trek: Short Treks, Alex Kurtzman's team initially planned a short featuring Nichelle Nichols reprising Uhura, in which a young Picard would visit her in a hospital and receive a mission related to the Borg; this short never moved forward but sparked the idea for a series about an older Picard.

Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman first pitched the series to Patrick Stewart with a four-page document, and Stewart initially took the meeting intending to turn the project down, only agreeing to reconsider after Kirsten Beyer convinced him.

The creative team, joined by novelist Michael Chabon, eventually expanded their pitch into a 35-page document that won Stewart's approval at a second meeting in March 2018.

A March 2019 production listing revealed the series was internally titled Star Trek: Destiny, a name CBS had trademarked in 2018, before the official title Star Trek: Picard was announced at CBS's upfront presentation that May.

The working title used during filming was Drawing Room.

Brent Spiner continued the Star Trek tradition of playing every male member of the Soong family, portraying Data, Altan Inigo Soong, Adam Soong, and Lore across the series.

The creative team initially debated not bringing back any Next Generation characters so Picard could stand alone for newcomers, but ultimately decided to include returning guests like Brent Spiner, Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, and Jeri Ryan to reward longtime fans.

Voyager actor Robert Duncan McNeill revealed he had been in talks to reprise his role as Tom Paris for two seasons of the series, but scheduling conflicts ultimately prevented his appearance.

Filming took place at Santa Clarita Studios in California rather than in Toronto (where Star Trek: Discovery is filmed), after the production received large tax credits from the California Film Commission.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the producers, who had only planned to film season two on its own, to shoot seasons two and three back-to-back due to scheduling delays; the combined production had more than 450 crew members and filming ran nearly 14 months, which Patrick Stewart, then in his 80s, described as both thrilling and difficult.

Composer Jeff Russo, a lifelong fan of The Next Generation, asked Alex Kurtzman if he could score Picard after seeing Stewart's announcement at the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention, and deliberately avoided reusing musical ideas from his work on Discovery.

Russo's main theme is bookended with a piccolo meant to evoke the fictional Ressikan flute Picard plays in the Next Generation episode 'The Inner Light', and also incorporates Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek: The Motion Picture theme and Alexander Courage's original series theme as connective references.

For the third season, composer Stephen Barton took over from Russo and brought in Craig Huxley to perform on the blaster beam, an instrument Huxley invented and had originally played on the soundtrack of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

A week after its premiere, CBS reported that Picard set a record for total streams of a CBS All Access original series, with 115 percent more streams than the previous record set by Discovery, and contributed to the platform's best month for new subscribers.

The debate over whether Picard remained the same character after his consciousness was transferred into a synthetic body sparked more than a week of discussion on the Memory Alpha wiki over whether to create a separate page for the synthetic version.