Company Intel Template
The 11-section research brief as a copy/paste fill-in, plus the cross-company comparison block and the rerun diff. Quality checks at the bottom.
Provenance
Adapted from Dean Peters' company-profile-executive-insights research prompt in the product-manager-prompts repo.
Before you fill anything in
Label every claim. This is an investigation artifact, so the reader must be able to tell what you know from what you inferred:
- Fact — stated in a named source, with a link
- Inference — your reasoning from one or more facts; show the chain
- Assumption — you needed it to proceed and could not verify it
An unlabeled brief is an opinion wearing a citation.
The brief
# Company Intel: [Entity] — [Date]
**Entry point:** [Single company / Competitor set / Industry / Discover competitors]
**Research window:** [dates covered]
**Confidence:** [High / Medium / Low] — [what drives it]
## 1. What This Entity Is
[Business definition, founding, market position, scale. What makes it distinct.]
## 2. How It Makes Money
[Revenue streams, cost structure, margin dynamics, financial logic.
Seasonal or cyclical patterns. Growth levers and risks.]
## 3. Who It Serves
[Buyers, users, influencers, administrators, blockers.
Segment differences. Multi-stakeholder complexity.]
## 4. What It Sells or Delivers
[Core value propositions. Key offers in plain language.
How the offer creates value for the customer.]
## 5. Key Product Lines or Offers
[Mapped by product family, platform, service, channel.
Digital vs. human-assisted. Legacy vs. emerging.
Distinguish: business line, offer, product, feature set, service layer,
enabling platform.]
## 6. Business and Market Pressures
[Competitive forces, regulatory pressure, technology shifts,
operational constraints. Name the tensions.]
## 7. Competitors and Alternatives
[Direct, adjacent, substitutes, emerging disruptors.
Where differentiation is won or lost.]
## 8. Important Trends and Risks
[Macro forces, buyer expectation shifts, AI and automation impact,
consolidation or commoditization threats.]
## 9. Strategic Signals
[Patents: recent filings, technology domains, R&D bets.
Hiring: volume roles, skills language, seniority patterns.
Leadership: arrivals, departures, origins, new roles created.
Source every signal.]
## 10. What This Means for Product Management
[Org dynamics, discovery maturity, delivery model, cross-functional
friction, AI readiness. Product-led vs. sales-led. Likely PM
challenges. Domain skills a PM would need here. Label inferences.]
## 11. Sources and Confidence
[All sources, organized by section. Assumptions and inferences flagged
explicitly. Sections where data was thin, named as thin.]Cross-company comparison (competitor sets only)
Produce sections 1-11 per company first, then:
## 12. Cross-Company Comparison
| Dimension | [Co A] | [Co B] | [Co C] |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business model | | | |
| Primary buyer | | | |
| Pricing posture | | | |
| Where they win | | | |
| Where they're exposed | | | |
| Strategic direction | | | |
**Where the market agrees:** [convergent bets]
**Where it splits:** [divergent bets — usually the interesting part]
**Whitespace:** [what nobody is serving, and a note on why]Rerun diff (Executive Signal Refresh)
When re-running against a prior brief, the changes are the output — not a fresh full brief.
## Signal Refresh: [Entity] — [prior date] -> [now]
### Then / Now
| Signal | Then | Now | So what |
|---|---|---|---|
| [theme] | [prior language] | [current language] | [implication] |
### Dropped Language
[What leaders have STOPPED saying since the last read. Often the
strongest signal in the document — a quietly retired priority says
more than a new one.]
### New Language
[Themes that appeared since the last read.]
### Unchanged
[What held steady. Stability is a finding too.]Quality checks
Any "no" is a rewrite, not a nitpick.
Evidence discipline
- Every claim carries Fact / Inference / Assumption
- Every Fact has a source link; every Inference shows its chain
- Thin sections are named as thin rather than padded
- Nothing was invented to complete a section — an honest gap beats a plausible fill
Depth
- Every section pushes past description to implication — "so what for us?"
- Section 6 names specific tensions, not a list of industry facts
- Section 9 signals are sourced individually, not summarized
- Section 10 says something a PM could act on this week
Source hygiene
- Primary sources preferred over coverage-of-coverage
- Do not sanitize — quote leadership language as spoken, including the awkward parts
- Dates on every signal; a two-year-old hiring pattern is not a current signal
Reruns
- The diff is the deliverable, not a regenerated brief
- Dropped Language is populated — if you skipped it, you skipped the best signal
- Unchanged items are listed rather than silently omitted