(2025-05-24) Ford My Practical Premeeting Ai Prompt That Helps Me Be A Better Listener

Paul Ford: My Practical “Pre-Meeting“ AI Prompt That Helps Me Be a Better Listener. At Aboard, we’re building a tool that helps you build business software very, very quickly. And lately we’re starting to have more meetings to pitch our approach—and I've been using AI to prep myself for those meetings.

When I used to work at an agency, it was always hard to prep for meetings like those. It was incumbent upon me to speak their language, not the other way around

now is a different era, and I’ve developed an LLM prompt for learning more about the people who want to meet. It works pretty well, especially in "Deep Research" mode, so I thought I’d share it. It generates a lot of output and may seem excessive or overwhelming. But frankly it's about the right level of detail, and Rich Ziade and I have closed a lot of business over the years.

I don't present this information, by the way. No one wants to see their company presented to them by a stranger. I use it to listen and ask less-dumb questions.

If you want to see example output—for the purposes of this exercise, I searched for "health tech company with around a thousand employees" and picked the first one that came up.

The Prompt

(It missed certain key things that wouldn't make news—like a firm leaving a market or quietly cancelling a product. But as a narrative of positive, active things a company has done in the past, I found the output quite solid.)

List the ten greatest risks to a business like this.

Help me understand their supply chain. Make sure I understand their customers and how they make money. From whom do they buy and to whom do they sell?

Write a report on the overall information technology needs of firms in this space.

I want to know where companies build versus buy.

At the end of the report, I would like you to make forward-looking statements about the future of the IT industry, and how that might affect the technology development in these industries

When discussing build-vs-buy, go into depth on specific vendors around all systems where possible. Be exhaustive and explain the unique selling propositions for each vendor—

Produce a full briefing with all of the information above. At the beginning, add a well-organized executive briefing with summary.

Make a list of the five main potential acquirers for these kinds of firms. Who are the biggest players in the space?

Finally, produce a formatted document I can import into Google Docs and edit.