Creating your First Project in Flow

Last updated: January 3, 2026

Here is a guide to setting up your first project in Flow.

For this example, we are building an Automotive EV.

There are five overarching steps

  1. Create New Project

  2. Import Requirements

  3. Generate a System Structure

  4. Allocate your Requirements to those Systems

  5. Add Ownership

These steps are designed to get your team to a critical point where enough structure and information is in place to begin building and evolving the project bottoms up.

Below is a link to download a spreadsheet that contains the requirements:

Step 1) Create New Project

First, we will first create a new project for our tutorial.

Step 2) Import Requirements

Next, we will bring requirements into Flow by using the importer tool in the dropdown of the New Requirement Button.

For more assistance, the tutorial on how Import Requirements is found here:

📄 Importing Requirements Into Flow

Step 3) Generate a System Structure

Next we will create a System Structure that makes sense for our project.

This can be thought of as a product breakdown structure.

For this example, we will take on the following Structure:

  • Vehicle Requirements

    • Battery

      • Thermal Management

        • Cooling

        • Heating

    • Body & Aero

      • Panels

      • Aero

    • Powertrain

    • Software

      • Autonomous Driving

      • Entry & Exit

All of the Systems for this example project have already been created and assigned to requirements in the spreadsheet that was imported.

Note: we can create Systems by taking the following steps:

  1. Select the Requirements tab

  2. Press the New System button and the top of the page

  3. Name the system

  4. Press enter

Step 4) Allocate Requirements to Systems

We will allocate each Requirement to the correct Parent System by dragging it into the correct place using the 6 dots on the left of the name column.

We can also select multiple items by clicking the check box on the left side to do bulk actions.

Step 5) Add ownership

In Flow, we can assign owners at both the System level and the Requirement level.

Note: More information about a System can be found by selecting the Focus button and then pressing the info ⓘ at the top of the page to the right of the system name.

Requirements and Systems in Flow must have one and only one owner, however they may contain many Reviewers and Subscribers. These can be assigned in the details plane. More information can be found in the following articles:

📄 The Review Process

📄 Subscribing to Change Notifications

Next Steps

We have now covered the basics in creating a project in Flow. The next steps include learning to use Design Values and Model Values to automatically validate requirements, build Test Cases and Test Plans to verify requirements, and use configurations and branching to iterate faster than ever before.