What Documents to Upload

Catio builds its understanding of your objectives and constraints from the documents you provide. This page is a concrete catalog of what to upload, organized by the four guidance types, and split by where the documents come from: internally sourced and publicly available.

You do not need all of these to start. Business intent and the live architecture state model carry most of the load on day one. Use this catalog to deepen coverage over time, auditing against the four categories as you go.

Internally sourced documents

Requirements

• Business requirements documents and feature requirements
• Non-functional requirements: SLAs, SLOs, performance and scale targets, availability and recovery objectives
• Data residency, retention, and integration requirements
• Regulatory compliance requirements applicable to your systems
• Technology and infrastructure assessments: current stack overviews that establish technical constraints and possibilities

Strategy and objectives

• Strategic plans and operating plans
• Product vision documents: the overarching purpose and long-term goals that give strategic context to every design
• Product strategy and roadmaps
• Sales and marketing strategies: how the product is positioned and what selling points drive priorities
• Financial reports and budgets: the financial constraints and projections that shape cost-benefit priorities
• Market analysis and competitive analysis: market trends, customer needs, and competitor positioning
• Customer feedback and surveys: direct insight into what features and improvements matter most
• User personas and journey maps: who the users are and where the pain points sit
• Stakeholder interviews and communication logs: perspectives from management, teams, and partners on needs and priorities

Policies, guardrails, and constraints

• Security policies and access control standards
• Compliance and audit documentation: SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and similar obligations
• Procurement and vendor policies, including approved and prohibited services
• Budget constraints and cost controls
• Data classification and handling rules
• The explicit do-not-do list: the boundaries your organization has already decided on

Standards and architecture encoding

• Architecture principles and reference architectures
• Architecture decision records: settled trade-offs with their rationale
• Approved patterns and golden paths for common service types
• Platform and tooling standards: preferred services, naming and tagging conventions
• Current product and technical documentation: user guides and technical specs that establish the present state
• Previous project post-mortems and retrospectives: the lessons that should inform every future design
• Patent applications and IP documentation, where relevant: the innovation focus that shapes future architecture

See Architecture Encoding for how to write these well, not just what to upload.

Publicly available documents

For publicly listed companies, public filings add strategic context that sharpens prioritization. These primarily strengthen the strategy and objectives category:

• 10-K reports: operations, financial condition, risk factors, and management's discussion and analysis. Strategic priorities and financial health that influence architecture priorities.
• Annual shareholder reports: goals, achievements, and strategic direction, often including the CEO letter.
• Competitor 10-K reports: where competitors are investing, how they are performing, and the challenges they face.
• Industry reports and market analysis: the broader trends, challenges, and growth areas in your sector.
• Other SEC filings: 8-Ks for major events, proxy statements for governance and strategy signals.
• Earnings call transcripts and investor presentations: management's own framing of performance and strategy.
• Stock analyst reports: an outside perspective on financial health and market position.
• Regulatory filings: for regulated industries, the compliance obligations that bound product and architecture decisions. These also strengthen the policies and constraints category.

Manual entries: when a document is overkill

Sometimes what you need to capture is one sentence, not a document. Manual entries are for exactly that. State one requirement per entry.

Effective entries are specific and measurable:

• "System must support 5,000 concurrent users with response times under 200ms"
• "Annual infrastructure budget cannot exceed $750K including licensing"
• "All customer data must reside in EU data centers per GDPR requirements"

Avoid vague statements that give the AI nothing to check a proposal against:

• "Improve system performance"
• "Reduce costs"
• "Better security"

Practical notes

• Categorize on upload. Catio organizes Context by department category: Business, Product, IT and Engineering, Security, Finance, and others. Use the department category for filing, but check your coverage against the four guidance types. Departments describe where documents come from. Guidance types describe what the AI does with them.
• Place at the right level. Organization-wide strategy, policies, and standards belong in Global Context. Workspace-specific requirements and objectives belong in Workspace Context.
• Check supported file types. See Supported File Types for the formats Context accepts.
• Quality over quantity. A curated set covering all four guidance types outperforms an indiscriminate archive. If a document no longer reflects reality, leave it out or retire it.