Team Organization
To overcome the "so much information, so less time" problem, you probably want to organize your team. There are many ways to organize your team. I recommend having a classic setup with product managers, a resource manager and a competitor analyzer. Obviously if you don't have enough team mates, some people will have to take over several roles.
Product managers
There simply is too much information for one person to have a good view of the whole game situation. As a rule of thumb: each product should have one and only one Product Manager. This is necessary unless you are having enough time to let two or more people analyze the same data. Product managers should focus on the 4 P (Product, Place, Promotion, Price) and ask themselves the following questions: Whom do I want to sell my product? Who buys my product? How can I improve my product to make it sell better? Is the price adapted to my customers? Is it too low? Too high? Is there still potential to sell more? Is the amount of advertising right? Shall more effort be put on sales? Product Managers should do the same analysis for the competitors of their product. When they have a really good view about their product, the market for their product and the competitors, they should make up decisions. The objective is to explain the situation to their team mates in an as concise as possible manner and to justify the decisions and the budget that will be needed.
Some dashboards product managers might want to consider:
- Market share in units for their product
- Ideal consumer values for their product
- Market potential for their product
Resource manager (Top management)
One person should analyze the firm. Is it sticking to the plan? What products are cash cows, which ones are poor dogs? Which product should get more budget? How profitable is our company (compared to the competitors)? Can we afford to launch a new product or shall we focus on the existing ones? Shall a product be abandoned? All these questions need to be answered. The resource manager needs to work closely together with the competitor analyzer.
Some dashboards the resource manager might want to consider:
- BCG Matrix for his company
- Total market share in value
- Gross margin per product
- Market potential per consumer group
- Budget per product allocation table
Competitor analyzer (Top management)
One person should analyze the other teams. What are their goals? Where are they heading too? What will be their next moves? Where are they spending money on? Are they doing research and want to launch a new product? What are their cash cows? Where are their weaknesses, their strengths? The task is similar to that of the resource manager, but because there is less information available, the competitor analyzer cannot make such a deep analysis of each team as the resource manager does for your team.
Some dashboards the competitor analyzer might want to consider:
- BCG Matrix for every company
- Market share in units per product
- Market share in value per consumer group
- SWOTs and financial reports for each competitor
Decision Meeting
To finalize your decisions you will want to have a team meeting at the end of each round. The top management should present the current situation to their team members. Then each product manager should present his product and his decisions. A presentation should be done in the most concise manner possible. If needed you might want to enforce this by imposing a maximum time length for a presentation. The top management will then have to allocate the budget to the different product managers and decide about the launch or abandoning of products. Of course, these decisions could also be voted by the whole team, but it might be that your team members have very different opinions on what shall be done. Therefore it would be best in that case the top management has the last word in case of a tie so that decisions can be taken quickly. Remember, time is money and you don't have much time. Hopefully, if everything goes according to your marketing plan, there will be no major decisions here. Don't worry if that does not happen to be the case; after all life is full of surprises.