Company Research — AI Company Research Briefing and Competitive Analysis Skill

Skill Overview

Company Research (company-research) is a skill that generates in-depth company research briefings from publicly available information. It focuses on executive strategic perspectives, product strategy, and organizational dynamics, supporting product manager interview preparation, competitive analysis, partner evaluation, and go-to-market decisions.

Use Cases

1. Product manager interview preparation: Quickly gain an understanding of a target company’s product strategy, product philosophy, and engineering culture before an interview, using real company context instead of relying on generic, improvised answers.
2. Competitor or partner briefings: Before an initial meeting with a competitor or potential partner, understand how the other party makes money, how it thinks about its product roadmap, and whether its strategic direction aligns with your own.
3. Go-to-market and benchmarking research: When entering a new market or conducting competitive benchmarking, understand how leading companies manage products and respond to transformation and competition, providing a basis for decision-making.

Core Features

1. Extraction of executive strategic perspectives: Extract strategic perspectives from key roles such as CEOs, COOs, VPs of Product, and Group PMs through public sources including earnings calls, podcast interviews (such as Lenny’s Podcast), conference presentations, and executive blogs. Every quote must include its source and date to ensure verifiability and traceability.
2. A systematic nine-step research framework: Proceed in the following order: company overview → executive perspectives → product insights → transformation strategy (digitalization/AI/agile) → organizational impact on product management → future roadmap and challenges → PLG growth insights → key takeaways. Each step provides a list of information sources to investigate and reminders about common pitfalls, avoiding superficial extraction limited to the “About Us” section.
3. Clearly defined research boundaries: Explicitly state that this is not financial valuation analysis or a SWOT assessment, and does not replace customer research. It records only the company’s own public statements. It also requires prioritizing recent information from the past 12–24 months and incorporating negative signals such as challenges and competitive threats to produce a complete rather than one-sided picture.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between Company Research and SWOT analysis?

They serve different purposes: SWOT evaluates the other party’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from your own perspective, while Company Research records the company’s own strategic expression—what executives think, where the product is headed, and how the organization operates. It records facts without judging them as good or bad; analytical conclusions are consolidated in the “Key Takeaways” section. The two can be used together: first use this skill to establish the other party’s perspective, then conduct your own assessment.

What are the skill’s information sources, and how reliable are they?

All information comes from public channels, including earnings calls for public companies, podcast interviews, conference presentation videos, company engineering and product blogs, LinkedIn, job descriptions—which reflect PM roles and team structures—and industry media coverage. Every executive quote must include its source link and date, with priority given to content from the past 12–24 months to avoid citing outdated strategy. One limitation is that if the target company’s executives make very few public statements, the depth of the briefing will be constrained.

Can it be used to prepare for product manager interviews?

Yes. This is one of its primary use cases. It organizes information about the target company’s product strategy, recent launches, product philosophy, PM influence within the organization, and collaboration methods, and generates “Key Takeaways” and a list of “Questions for Further Research” that can be used directly in interviews. The estimated time required is 20–40 minutes. This is external public research and cannot replace verification of the company’s actual internal situation.

Who else is it suitable for?

In addition to job seekers, it is suitable for product managers conducting competitive analysis, business development professionals evaluating potential partners and seeking to understand their actual revenue models and strategic direction, and teams making go-to-market decisions and researching how incumbents operate. It is not intended for internal company analysis and cannot replace customer-facing user research.