Setting up your business strategy in Cedros

Set up Strategy so Cedros has a clear account of your business: who you serve, what you offer, how you communicate, and what you want to achieve. Start with the decisions you know, record what still needs research, and review suggestions before relying on them.

Strategy is shared with your team. Use it for business information that belongs in that shared workspace. For short facts and preferences, see Understanding Memory and Strategy.

Open your plans

Open Assistant → Strategy and select Plans. You will see the business plans, their readiness, and a suggested next place to work. Products is a separate area for plans about particular products or offers; start in Plans for the decisions that apply across your business.

You can fill in a plan yourself, or use the Strategy conversation to work through a decision. Reading and editing saved plans does not require sending an AI request. Draft with Cedros and Discuss in chat open the Strategy conversation with a prepared prompt. Review it before sending; AI replies can add to your usage and costs.

If the page is read-only or editing controls are unavailable, ask your administrator to check your feature access.

Start with the foundation

Begin with Business Strategy Plan and Brand Guidelines. These capture the business direction and communication rules used by many other plans.

For your first pass, gather a few concrete notes:

• What you sell or provide, and who benefits from it.
• The customer problem you address and why someone would choose you.
• Your current business situation, near-term goals, and constraints.
• Your voice, tone, visual direction, and claims you can support.
• Important assumptions that need evidence before you treat them as facts.

For example, “We repair commuter bicycles for riders in our neighborhood, with same-day service for common repairs” is more useful than “We offer excellent service.” Use details that are true for your business, including limits on what you can promise.

Next, work on Customer Profiles and Customer Journey Map. Customer Profiles builds on Business Strategy; Customer Journey builds on Customer Profiles. Follow the prerequisite names shown beside a plan or in its Related plans panel.

Choose the plans that support your work

The 12 plans are grouped by purpose:

• Foundation: Business Strategy Plan, Brand Guidelines, Customer Profiles, and Customer Journey Map establish the business, audience, and customer experience.
• Customer experience: Product & Service Roadmap and Customer Support Plan guide improvements and how you help customers.
• Growth: Marketing Strategy Plan and Partnerships & Outreach Plan connect your priorities to offers, campaigns, relationships, and outreach.
• Content channels: Search Strategy Plan, Blog & Editorial Plan, Social Media Plan, and Video Content Plan guide the work you intend to do in those channels.

You do not need to invent a strategy for every channel in one sitting. Start with the plans relevant to your immediate work and complete their prerequisites. For example, Marketing Strategy depends on Business Strategy, Customer Profiles, and Brand Guidelines; the content-channel plans build on relevant foundation and marketing decisions.

Open a plan's Where this is used panel and How Cedros uses this plan guidance to see why its decisions matter. A plan is useful context for work; saving it does not publish a webpage, send a campaign, or launch a product.

Fill in and save one section at a time

1. Select a plan in Plans.
2. For an empty plan, choose Fill it in myself, or use Add details on a section. For existing answers, choose Edit. A section containing proposed answers may show Review suggestions.
3. Answer the section's questions with specific, current information. Follow the hints for structured entries such as customer profiles or journey stages.
4. Check each answer's status, including any unknowns or exclusions.
5. Select Save in that section. Wait for saving to finish and read the saved summary.
6. Continue to the next section, then return through Back to Strategy and reopen the plan to confirm your changes.

You can save partial progress. You do not have to finish every plan before keeping the decisions you have already made.

Use Cancel to discard the current section's unsaved edits. If you navigate elsewhere with pending changes, review the save-or-discard choice before leaving.

Keep facts, suggestions, and unknowns distinct

The answer status tells Cedros how to treat a response:

• Answer this question: enter an answer you have checked and are ready to use.
• Suggestion awaiting review: inspect the proposed answer, correct unsupported details, and select Accept reviewed answer only when it is suitable. Then Save the section.
• Not known yet: explain what needs to be learned and the next step. Keep the uncertainty visible instead of filling the field with a guess.
• Not applicable: explain why the question does not apply to your business.

For example, if you have not established which audience buys most often, record the uncertainty and the evidence you plan to gather. Do not turn a plausible audience into a confirmed customer profile just to raise the progress count.

When working in Strategy chat, ask Cedros to keep assumptions explicit and propose answers for your review. Open the affected plan afterward and check what was saved. Review suggestions in the plan itself; a helpful conversation is not a substitute for checking the business information you will reuse.

Understand readiness

The plan header shows the number of essential decisions ready. Not started means no decisions have been captured; Needs decisions means more work remains; Ready to use means the essential decisions and required plans meet the readiness checks.

Questions marked Optional detail do not all need answers for the plan to become ready. A reasoned Not applicable answer can resolve a decision; an unknown or an unreviewed suggestion does not.

If a plan is blocked by another plan, open the listed prerequisite and work through its missing decisions. You can still open and save the dependent plan, but its readiness also depends on those prerequisites.

Readiness helps you find gaps. It does not verify that your claims are true, that your research is sufficient, or that a proposed campaign will work. Review the substance of the plan as well as its status.

Keep your strategy useful

Revisit the relevant plans when your offer, audience, pricing approach, support policy, or priorities change. Update the original answer so later work is based on the current decision. Review related plans when a foundation decision changes.

If Cedros marks a plan Updated after a conversation, open it and review the changed answers. If you also have an outdated saved memory about that decision, correct the memory separately.

If a save fails, read the error and keep a copy of your intended change. When Reload latest plan is offered, another saved version may be newer: preserve your correction, reload, and compare before applying it again. Do not assume an error means another teammate's work can be overwritten.

For a problem you cannot resolve, ask for help with the plan name, section, visible error, and approximate time. Share only the business information needed to explain the issue.