Research / AI
Research / AI case study — how Meritt Dev built and runs Executive pay research: from a $3,995 PDF to an interactive benchmarking tool Executive pay research: from a $3,995 PDF to an interactive benchmarking tool
A US media and research company serving CEOs and board directors runs an annual survey of executive pay at private companies, which grew from about 600 to more than 1,500 responses. The product built on it was a static PDF report, sold for $3,995, and buyers had to work out where they stood themselves.
Overview
We built the interactive research tool that replaced the PDF: a guided intake, a benchmark against both the private survey and public SEC filings, pay scenarios, and board-ready exports. Delivered by Meritt's founders as engineering leads on the project, working with our US partner studio.
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The challenge
The yearly process ran survey tool to Excel to hand-cleaned spreadsheets to intern-built PowerPoint charts. Custom committee requests were done by hand, and nothing compared a private company's package against its public peers.
Survey confidentiality rules had to hold in software: only quartiles, only for groups of at least 25 companies, never an individual response.
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What we built
An invite-only tool where a compensation committee chair or HR leader completes a five-step intake and gets a review with Package, Benchmark and Scenarios tabs: private-survey quartiles next to SEC public peers, guaranteed versus at-risk pay modelled across four scenarios, and a board brief or HR talking points exported as PDF, PowerPoint or Excel.
Public data comes from SEC EDGAR proxy statements and annual reports with market-data fallbacks, refreshed on seven schedules. An AI 'Ask about this review' answers with citations to the figures behind it, with question sets per role and perspective. A 29-step guided tour, an 18-article help centre and an admin console round it out.
Next.js and PostgreSQL on Azure Container Apps with Key Vault, Blob Storage and Service Bus; 2,530 automated tests.
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Where it is now
From first prototype on 23 July to a live, invite-only product in about three months, with weekly review calls with the client's leadership throughout.
The public-data layer holds 4,310 usable CEO pay records; one import of 2,276 companies produced 16,194 data points with zero failures. Company search went from 8.7 seconds to 2.2, and a live export ran to 21 PDF pages and 26 slides.
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