Quick Start Guide

How to set up Brief in 5 minutes. Step-by-step guide to aligning your team and agents from vision to impact.

Last updated: April 13, 2026

Get Brief up and running in just 5 minutes. This guide walks you through account setup, connecting your tools, and getting your team aligned.

Before You Start

Brief works best when you have at least one of these tools:

  • Linear, Jira, or Asana for work tracking
  • Notion, Confluence, or Google Drive for documentation
  • GitHub for codebase analysis

You can start with just one and add more later—Brief builds your Product Graph as you connect more tools.

Zero integrations required to sign up, but you'll get limited value without at least one connected tool.

Step 1: Create Your Account

  1. Go to app.briefhq.ai
  2. Sign up with Google, GitHub, or email
  3. Create your organization (each team gets an isolated workspace)

Step 2: Add Company Information

Brief starts with a short company step that collects:

  • Organization name
  • Website
  • Your title
  • Development team size

Brief uses that to personalize the workspace and kick off downstream context extraction after onboarding.

Step 3: Connect Your First Integration

Start with the tool you use most:

Linear is great for first-time setup because it gives Brief:

  • Velocity data (how fast you ship)
  • What's being built right now
  • Your work pipeline
  1. Open Integrations in Brief
  2. Find Linear and click Connect
  3. Authorize Brief in the OAuth flow
  4. Choose the teams or scopes you want Brief to use
  5. Finish setup and let the initial sync start

Other Integrations

GitHub — Shows what's actually built vs. what's planned Notion/Confluence/Google Drive — Extracts strategy and product docs Jira/Asana — Alternative work tracking tools Fireflies/Fathom/Granola — Captures customer research from calls PostHog — Analytics for understanding user behavior

Some integrations finish in one OAuth step. Others, like Linear, GitHub, and Asana, include a short follow-up setup screen where you pick teams, repos, projects, or workspaces. Either way, Brief starts extracting context in the background — no waiting required.

Step 4: Review Extracted Context

As Brief analyzes your connected tools, you'll see review modals when data is ready. Visit different sections to review and approve:

  • Product Context — Company info, goals, and competitive advantages
  • Features — Product capabilities Brief found
  • Personas — Customer segments Brief identified
  • Decisions — Important choices to log

Approve or edit the extracted data. Brief won't overwrite your changes once you approve them.

Step 5: Ask Your First Question

Now try Brief chat. The empty state shows a small set of contextual presets based on your page, connected tools, and how long you've been using Brief.

Common examples include:

  • 🔭 "I'm new to Brief, show me around"
  • 🚏 "What should we build next?"
  • 👤 "Who are we building for?"
  • 📏 "How do we know it's working?"
  • ⚖️ "What should we stop doing?"

Try These Questions

  • "Do we already have authentication?" (checks your actual codebase)
  • "What did we decide about the pricing model?" (searches decision history)
  • "What are customers saying about onboarding?" (searches research signals)

Step 6: Connect to Your AI Coding Tools (Optional)

Want Brief to work with Cursor, Claude Code, VS Code, Claude Desktop, or Codex? Set up the Model Context Protocol:

  1. Open the Integrations page in Brief
  2. Launch the MCP setup flow and pick your AI tool's tab
  3. Follow the host-native install steps — every client opens a browser for OAuth on first tool call. No API key required.

If your host surfaces Brief prompts, start with /brief-setup after connecting. Returning users on a new surface can use /brief-welcome-back; otherwise the MCP setup flow falls back to brief_get_onboarding_context and, for fresh coding repos, brief_ask(..., onboarding: true).

See the Brief MCP Setup Guide for per-client instructions, or the Brief CLI Setup if you prefer shell-based access for your coding agent.

Next Steps

Troubleshooting

Integration won't connect Make sure you have admin access to the tool you're connecting. Brief needs read permissions to extract context.

Data isn't syncing Initial sync takes 1-5 minutes depending on the tool and your workspace size. Check the Integrations page to see sync status.

Answers seem incomplete Brief provides better answers as you connect more data sources. Start with Linear + GitHub, then add documentation and customer research tools for richer context.

Need more help? Check our Troubleshooting Guide or contact support.