This guide takes you from a rough idea to a project that builders can pick up. Grove does most of the writing. Your job is to answer its questions and make the decisions.
About the setup checklist
Workspace admins see a setup checklist on the Queue, called Get Grove ready for your team. Its four steps match steps 1 to 3 of this guide, plus connecting your coding agents.
A step gets a check mark when it's done: GitHub is connected, all four strategy documents are filled in, or the workspace has an initiative.
Grove can't tell when your coding agents are connected. When they are, click Mark done.
If you don't use GitHub, click Skip.
When all four steps are done, Grove shows Setup complete, and the checklist leaves your Queue. If you finished it by mistake, click Undo right away.
1. Connect your code
Connect your GitHub repositories first. Grove then plans from what you've already built, and it can check what ships later. Grove only reads your code. It never changes it.
On the Queue, find Connect your code in the setup checklist, and click Connect GitHub. GitHub asks you to pick the organization and the repositories Grove can read.
Note: Only workspace admins can connect GitHub, and only admins see the setup checklist. If you're not an admin, ask one to connect GitHub for you. See Connect GitHub.
2. Set up your product strategy
Grove also plans better when it knows your product. In the setup checklist, find Set up your product strategy, and click Set up with Grove. Or ask Grove in the chat: "Help me set up our product strategy."
Grove first asks what your company makes and who it's for. It also asks what it may look at, such as your website, your docs, a connected repository, or competitors you name. Grove researches only what you agree to. Then it writes four shared documents with you, one at a time, in this order:
Document | What it covers | Sections Grove fills in |
Target Personas | The main users of your product | For each persona: Role, Goals, Pain Points, Current Workflow, and What Success Looks Like. Then Persona Prioritization: which persona comes first, and why. |
Product Vision | Why the product exists, and what success looks like in 3 to 5 years | Why This Product Exists, The World We're Building Toward, Who Benefits, and What Makes This Possible Now |
Product Strategy | The step-by-step path from today to the vision | Current Position, Strategic Bets, Sequencing, and What We're NOT Doing |
Competitive Landscape | Your competitors, and how you're different | Market Overview. Then for each competitor: URL, Positioning, Strengths, Weaknesses, and Key Differentiator. Then Our Differentiation. |
Grove skips any document that is already filled in. If all four are filled in, it offers to sharpen one instead.
You can skip this step and come back later. Grove still plans without it, but it can't check new ideas against your strategy.
3. Describe a new capability
Go to Work and click New work.
Give the idea a short name.
Describe it in a few sentences: the problem, who has it, and why it matters now. You can attach notes, research, or customer feedback.
Click Create initiative.
Grove creates the initiative and opens a chat about it.
4. Answer Grove's questions
Grove asks a few questions before it writes anything. For each one, pick an answer, write your own, or choose Help me explore & decide to compare the options. Expect Grove to push back when an assumption looks risky.
5. Review the Opportunity and Solution
Grove writes the first plan document, Opportunity and Solution. It covers the business need, the users and their problems, and the solution. Grove also lists anything that is still open. Answer those points in the chat.
Read the document and change anything that's wrong. You can edit it directly, or tell Grove what to change.
6. Break the work into projects
Ask Grove to break the initiative into projects, or click Break this into projects on the initiative's Overview. Grove proposes a set of small projects, in the order to build them, starting with the riskiest. Each project gets 1 to 3 outcomes: things a user can do once it ships.
Check the proposal, then confirm it. Grove creates the projects and writes them into the Scope document, together with what is out of scope.
7. Settle the requirements
Open a project and ask Grove to draft its requirements, or click Draft requirements. Grove starts with an agenda: one heading for each decision, marked Not yet discussed. Then it works through them with you, one at a time.
When you're done, Grove checks the document for gaps and conflicts. Any question that is still open stays in the document, so a builder can see it.
8. Mark the project ready to build
When the requirements are settled, open the project's Overview, click its status, and choose Ready. Builders can now pick it up. In tables, this status shows as Ready to build.
Before builders can start, they need two things:
An invitation to your workspace. See Invite teammates.
The Grove command-line tool in their coding agent. Send them Quick start for builders.
9. Check what shipped
When a builder links a pull request to the project and it merges, Grove reads the code. Next to each outcome, Grove shows whether the work looks done. Review the work, then tick each outcome that you've seen working. When every outcome is done, set the project to Built.
This step needs GitHub connected to your workspace. See step 1.