What makes a briefing actually readable
After writing several hundred company briefings, we have opinions on which structures land and which feel like JSON dumps in prose form.
We have written several hundred briefings now, and we have a small but accumulating set of opinions on what makes one readable. They mostly aren’t about the data. They’re about the prose.
Lead with what changed, not what is
The first instinct, when writing a briefing, is to start with what the company does. This is wrong. The reader almost always knows what the company does — that’s why they have the meeting. What they don’t know is what is true right now that wasn’t true six months ago. The TL;DR should be the delta, not the description. Description is for the “what they do” section, which comes second precisely because it’s less interesting.
Plain English beats jargon
Every company’s own About page is written in marketing jargon. A briefing that lifts the jargon — “the leading agentic platform for spend optimisation” — is a briefing that fails the reader. A briefing that translates that into “they sell software that automates expense approvals” is one the reader can actually use.
This is harder than it sounds. The model is happy to produce jargon. Getting it to produce plain English requires explicit prompting and, often, a second pass that rewrites the first.
Specific names. Specific dates. No round numbers.
“A lot of recent hiring” is a sentence the reader can’t do anything with. “Headcount grew ~14% QoQ, almost entirely in product engineering” is. Specifics let the reader form a question. Vagueness lets them only nod.
The same goes for dates. “Recently launched a procurement API” is worse than “launched a procurement API on May 8th.” The first sounds like fluff. The second sounds like research.
One quotable line per briefing
The best briefings have a single sentence the reader can lift and use. “Their April reorg moved BD under the office of the CEO — expect a fast yes or a fast no, not a long evaluation.” This is the sentence that makes the briefing worth $0.40. Everything else around it is supporting evidence.
If we can’t find a quotable line, the briefing is probably about a company too quiet to need a briefing in the first place. We say so and refund.
Honest gaps at the end, always
Every briefing closes with what we couldn’t find. This is partly principle (see the post on honest gaps) and partly craft. A gap section signals to the reader that the rest of the briefing isn’t bluff — we are being careful enough about our sources that we’ll tell you where they ran out.
Three pages is too long
The briefing is read in the cab on the way to the meeting. If it’s longer than two pages it doesn’t get read. If it’s shorter than half a page it didn’t do enough work. The right length is one page that takes three minutes to read.