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Research → brief

Research fails at the handoff, not at the gathering. Forty pages of notes and a team that still doesn't know what to build. This is how I compress a pile of talks, papers and threads into one page someone can act on — and what I do to keep it from being confidently wrong.

The method has three passes: collect wide, verify hard, cut to one page. They're separate on purpose. Verifying while you gather makes you stop at the first plausible source; cutting while you verify makes you keep the claims you already wrote nicely.

Pass 1 · Collect wide

Sweep from several angles at once, because each angle is blind to what the others find:

For a talk or interview, work from a timestamped transcript, not from memory or a summary. Every claim you carry forward keeps its timestamp — so a disagreement later takes thirty seconds to settle instead of a re-watch.

Capture format

One line per claim, in this shape, from the first minute:

CLAIM   | Model training costs fell ~40% year over year
SOURCE  | [name], [type: filing / talk / post], [date], [link or 14:32]
KIND    | fact · forecast · opinion · anecdote
STATUS  | unverified

KIND is the field people skip and then regret. A forecast dressed as a fact is the single most common way a brief goes wrong — nobody lied, the tense just quietly changed somewhere between the transcript and the slide.

Pass 2 · Verify hard

Now go back and try to break your own list.

Two independent sources, primary over aggregators

Every load-bearing claim needs two sources that don't derive from each other. Three articles citing the same press release is one source wearing three hats — and it's the failure mode that feels the most like thoroughness.

PreferOver
The filing, the paper, the primary documentThe article about it
The full transcriptThe clip
The datasetThe chart made from it
The person saying it themselvesSomeone reporting what they said

Attribute the person, not the caption

On-screen titles and channel descriptions are marketing. Cross-check who someone actually is and what they're actually selling before you weight their claim — a founder's forecast about their own market is data about the founder.

Mark uncertainty instead of dissolving it

When two good sources disagree, the honest output is "sources disagree, here's the range" — not the midpoint, and not the one that fits your narrative. Every claim ends as one of four: verified · disputed · unverified · false. "Unverified" is a legitimate thing to ship. A fabricated certainty is not.

The point of verification isn't confidence. It's knowing precisely where your confidence ends.

Pass 3 · Cut to one page

One page is the constraint that does the work. It forces a decision about what actually matters, and that decision is the value you're delivering — not the notes.

The brief

  1. The finding — one sentence. What is true now that we didn't know last week. If you can't write this line, you haven't finished the research.
  2. Why it matters to us — two or three lines, in our terms: our users, our roadmap, our costs. Generic significance is not significance.
  3. The evidence — three to five claims, each with its source and status. This is where verified and disputed become visible, not a footnote.
  4. What we'd do about it — two or three concrete options with a real trade-off between them. Not recommendations in the abstract: things a team could start on Monday.
  5. What we still don't know — the open questions, named. This is the section that earns trust, and the one most people cut for space.

Everything else — the transcript, the full claim list, the dead ends — goes in an appendix or a linked doc. It isn't wasted. It's the thing you reach for when someone challenges line 3, and it's why the one page holds up.

Three failure modes