How to Brief Your Team Without Wasting Time

Monday morning. Team meeting. Someone spends the first 15 minutes "updating everyone on what happened in the market this week." That person spent an hour preparing. The team gets restless. The update has no structure. By the time it's done, you've wasted 15-20 minutes for 5 people—that's over an hour of productive time burned.

There's a better system. It starts with being ruthlessly structured about what your team needs to know and doesn't.

The Three Categories of Information

Not all market information matters to everyone on your team. Structure your briefing around three categories:

1. Strategic Information (Everyone needs to know)

Major market shifts. Regulatory changes. Competitor moves that affect strategy. This is what your team should discuss and debate in the meeting. This deserves 5-10 minutes of discussion.

2. Role-Specific Information (Relevant to your department)

Sales team needs to know about customer trends and competitor announcements. Product needs to know about market signals and customer pain points. Finance needs to know about funding activity. Don't bore everyone with role-specific details. Forward relevant information to the relevant people before the meeting.

3. Nice-to-Know Information (Interesting but not actionable)

Industry trends, thought leadership, general awareness. Skip this in meetings. Share it via email or a shared doc if people care. Most people don't.

The System

Friday End of Day: Scan Your Feed

Spend 10 minutes reviewing the week's intelligence. What actually matters? What should the team know about? Write it down. Three bullet points. That's your strategic briefing.

Friday Evening: Distribute Role-Specific Information

Identify information relevant to specific teams. Forward those insights directly to those teams before Monday. They read them over the weekend, come to Monday meeting ready to discuss.

Monday Morning: 10-Minute Briefing

Team comes to meeting already informed about their role-specific topics. You spend 10 minutes on strategic information: what happened, why it matters, what we're doing about it. Discussion happens. Done.

The Time Savings

• You save 50 minutes of prep time (no more manually searching for news)
• Your team saves 15 minutes in the meeting (no boring waiting for information)
• Everyone gets relevant information (not wasted time on topics that don't apply to them)
• Discussion focuses on strategy, not catch-up

Over a quarter, that's 25+ hours of productive time recovered from your team. And the team is actually better informed because they got the right information at the right time for their role.

The Tool That Makes It Work

This system requires something that most teams don't have: curated, pre-analyzed market intelligence delivered directly. If you're manually scraping news feeds and writing your own analysis, this system falls apart. You don't have time to do this every Friday.

But if you have a tool that delivers 5-7 pre-analyzed market insights every morning, already sorted by department and strategic impact, then this system takes 10-15 minutes on Friday instead of an hour.

Smart teams don't spend more time on intelligence briefings. They automate the research so they can focus on the decisions.