I’m starting to feel a bit overwhelmed by Claude. Every day I see new advice, new workflows, new files, new settings… and I’m honestly a bit lost. I’m not a developer. I’m a Product manager, and I’m trying to use Claude better for product work: research synthesis, framing problems, writing specs, structuring ideas, improving prompts, etc. So far, I’ve used Claude Chat with memory and custom instructions. I added things like how I want Claude to talk to me, the kind of outputs I prefer, my work context, tone of voice, etc. But now I keep seeing people talk about “claude . MD” , especially in Claude Code / Claude workspaces, and I don’t really understand how it fits with memory and instructions. A few basic questions: Is “claude . MD” global, or is it linked to one specific project? Is it basically the equivalent of memory/custom instructions, but for Claude Code or cowork ? What should actually go inside a “claude . MD” file? Tone of voice? Project context? Working rules? Output formats? Should you have one “claude . MD” per project, or one reusable structure across projects? If my projects often follow the same broad framework, should I repeat the same instructions in each project? I’ve seen people mention /init to create a “claude . MD”, but it seems to be available in Claude Code, not Claude cowork or Chat. Is that right? As a non-dev, should I still be using Claude Code? What can I actually do with it for product work? And if “claude . MD” is already the reference file, why do people also create separate reference files? I’ve asked Claude to explain this, but it usually gives me a very long answer that makes things even less clear. Could someone explain the overall logic in simple terms? Maybe with a concrete example of how a non-dev PM could structure this properly? submitted by /u/Brain-digest
Originally posted by u/Brain-digest on r/ClaudeCode