Key Concepts

Understand the core concepts behind Brief: how it builds your Product Graph, integrations, and how Brief navigates AI coding agents to the context they need.

Last updated: February 21, 2026

Understanding these core concepts will help you get the most value from Brief—your Navigator from vision to impact.

How Brief Builds Your Product Graph

Brief builds your Product Graph automatically by connecting to your existing tools. It extracts and synthesizes:

  • Features — Your product capabilities and their status
  • Personas — Your customer segments and their needs
  • Decisions — Important choices with rationale
  • Goals — Your strategic objectives
  • Velocity — How fast you ship
  • Research Signals — What customers are saying

The Process

  1. You provide company info during onboarding
  2. Brief syncs your tools (Linear, GitHub, Notion, etc.)
  3. Brief builds your Product Graph from decisions, customers, and strategy
  4. You review and approve what Brief found
  5. It updates continuously as new data arrives

Brief keeps every builder aligned as you connect more tools and as your product evolves.

Data Sources & Integrations

Brief connects to your tools in two ways:

One-Click OAuth

Linear, GitHub, Notion, Confluence, Jira, Asana, Fathom, Granola, Google Drive, HubSpot, Attio, Supabase, Slack

These use OAuth—you click "Connect," authorize Brief, choose what to share, and you're done. After authorization, each integration includes a scoping step where you select exactly what data Brief can access.

  • Sync time: 30 seconds to 5 minutes depending on workspace size
  • Update frequency: Continuous (webhooks + polling)

API Key Setup

Fireflies, PostHog, Stripe, LangFuse, Helicone, Lightfield

These require you to create an API key and paste it into Brief.

  • Why API keys? These tools don't offer OAuth for their APIs
  • Security: Brief stores your keys encrypted

Communication Tools

Slack

Install Brief's Slack bot to use the /decide command for logging decisions directly from Slack conversations.

Current State vs Product Understanding

Brief distinguishes between what's actually built and what's planned or understood:

Current State (Ground Truth)

What's actually in your codebase right now—analyzed from GitHub. This is reality.

Use Current State when:

  • "Do we have authentication?"
  • "What's our tech stack?"
  • "Is feature X already built?"

Product Understanding (Synthesized)

Your company context, velocity, personas, and goals—synthesized from all your tools. This is strategic intelligence.

Use Product Understanding when:

  • "Who are our users?"
  • "What should we build next?"
  • "Why did we decide X?"
Always check Current State for critical decisions about what's actually in your codebase. Product understanding shows what's planned or documented, but code is the source of truth for what exists.

Documents & Decisions

Documents

General product documents you create in Brief—specs, strategy docs, planning docs. These live in your Brief workspace and are searchable via chat.

Decisions

A special type of document that records important choices with:

  • What was decided
  • Why that choice was made
  • When and by whom

Decisions are immutable—they can be archived but never deleted. This creates an audit trail of your product evolution.

Logging Decisions

From Slack:

/decide Use weekly sprints instead of kanban

From Chat:

"Let's decide to use Postgres for the database"

From the Web UI: Navigate to Documents → New Decision

When an AI later asks "Why did we choose React?", Brief can surface the original decision with full context.

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

MCP is how Brief navigates AI coding agents like Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, and VS Code to the context they need.

What Brief Provides via MCP

When you ask your AI coding agent a question, Brief navigates it to:

  • Your Product Graph (personas, features, goals)
  • Decision history ("Why did we do X?")
  • Current State ("Do we already have Y?")
  • Create new documents with your approval

How It Works

  1. You install Brief's MCP server in your AI tool
  2. You authenticate via OAuth or API key
  3. Brief navigates your AI to the right context
  4. Every builder stays aligned, session after session
Destructive operations require confirmation. If an AI tries to delete or move something, Brief asks you to approve first.

Preset Prompts

Brief provides optimized preset prompts for common questions:

  • 🔭 "I'm new to Brief" — Guided tour
  • 🚏 "What should we build next?" — Evidence-backed priorities
  • 👤 "Who are we building for?" — ICP with data
  • 📏 "How do we know it's working?" — Measurement plan
  • ⚖️ "What should we stop doing?" — Low-ROI identification

These are carefully designed to query the right data sources and provide actionable answers.

Next Steps

Now that you understand the key concepts: