Claude for Your Team · Lesson 4 of 7

Projects: shared work, shared instructions

20 minutes. The owner (or office lead) builds; everyone uses. Set up two or three shared Projects so the whole team starts from the same instructions and the same files.

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Watch a team use Claude for a month without Projects and you'll see the same thing. Everyone writes their own setup. "You're helping a heating and cooling company in…" typed fresh, six different ways, by six people. One of them has the current price list. Two have last year's. The answers don't match, and nobody knows why.

A Project fixes that. It's a workspace with saved instructions and saved files. Every chat inside it starts with both. Build it once, share it with the team, and everyone gets the same starting point.

The parts that matter, from Anthropic's help center:

• Instructions apply to every chat in the project.
• Knowledge (files you upload) is available to every chat in the project. On paid plans, when a project's files get large, Claude automatically switches to a mode that lets it handle more.
• Visibility. When you create a project on a Team plan, you choose to keep it private or share it with your broader organization. A public project can be viewed and used by everyone in the organization. A private one only by people you invite.
• Permissions. When you share, each person gets Can view (they can see the instructions and files and chat in the project, but not change it) or Can edit (they can change instructions, files and sharing).
• Your chats stay yours. Even in a public project, each person's chats are private unless they choose to share them. Sharing a project shares the setup, not the conversations.
• Separate memory. Each project has its own memory, so context from one doesn't spill into another.

Pick the jobs your team repeats every week, where everyone should give the same answer. For most small businesses, the first three are some mix of:

• Customer replies: emails, texts and review replies, in your voice, with your real facts. (The Answer Customers Faster with AI course builds this one in full.)
• Office procedures: "how do we do this here?" Your handbook, policies and checklists, so a new hire can ask instead of interrupting someone.
• Estimates or proposals: your price book, your standard terms, and the way you write them up.

At Comfort Zone, Tina built three: Customer Replies, Office Handbook and Estimate Letters.

• Go to claude.ai/projects.
• Click + New Project.
• Give it a plain name everyone will recognize, like "Customer Replies," and a short description. (Anthropic notes Claude doesn't read the name and description. They're for people.)
• Choose visibility. For a team-wide project, choose to share it with your organization. For something only the office managers should use, keep it private and invite them.

Click Set project instructions, write them, and click Save instructions.

Good project instructions are short and specific. Use this shape:

> You help the office team at [business name], a [what you do] in [area]. A person on our team reviews everything before it's used or sent. > > Your job in this project: [one sentence, e.g. "draft estimate letters from the technician's notes"]. > > Use only the facts in the project files. If something you need isn't in them, write [CHECK: what's missing] instead of guessing. > > Tone: [three to five words, e.g. plain, friendly, short, confident]. > > Never: [e.g. promise arrival times, guarantee energy savings, offer discounts, give legal or medical advice]. > > When unsure: say so, and tell the person who on our team should decide.

Then click + on the project's main page to add the files: the price book, the handbook, a few of your best past examples with customer details removed.

One rule for project files: treat them like anything else in the account. No customer lists, no employee records, no passwords. A project shared with the whole organization is visible to the whole organization.

Click Share, to the right of the project name. Add people by name or email, and choose Can view or Can edit.

The rule that keeps projects trustworthy:

• Can edit: one or two people who own the facts. For the Estimate Letters project, that's whoever sets prices.
• Can view: everyone else. They can use it all day. They just can't change the price book by accident.

When someone on a view-only seat spots a wrong fact, they tell the editor, and the editor fixes the file. One source, kept current.

To take someone off a project, a person with Can edit clicks the role next to their name and chooses Remove access.

Here's why shared Projects matter beyond convenience. When someone leaves your organization, Anthropic's help center says:

• The remaining members can't open the departed person's chats.
• Their private projects become inaccessible to everyone else.
• Projects they shared stay available to the people they were shared with.
• Owners can't open a removed member's private chats or projects. The Primary Owner can export that person's project and chat data.

So the lesson is simple: anything the business depends on lives in a shared project, not in one person's private chats. If Tina keeps the only good estimate template in a private project, it's stuck there if she leaves. In a shared project, it stays with the business.

• Archive a project you've stopped using, from its three-dot menu. Archived projects keep their members and sharing.
• Review the files monthly. A project is only as good as the price book inside it. Put a date in each file's name, like "Price book 2026-10."
• Name an owner for every shared project, and write it on your Team Setup Checklist.

• Pick your first two or three jobs.
• Build one project today: instructions, files, and sharing with the right permissions.
• Ask two people on the team to use it for a real task this week and tell you one thing that was wrong or missing.
• Fix it, then build the next one.

Check it worked

• At least one shared project exists, with saved instructions and current files.
• Each shared project has one or two editors and everyone else on Can view.
• Nobody on the team is keeping an important template only in a private chat.
• Every project file has a date, and every project has a named owner on the checklist.

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Next: files, documents, decks and dashboards, and connecting Claude to your other tools.

→ Lesson 5: Files, Docs, Slides, Design, Dashboards and connectors

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