Concealing your weaknesses alone will not make you a winner

My young daughter is quite competitive by nature and when we first started playing chess she immediately focused all her attention on not losing, whether that was about individual pieces or the whole game. She quickly improved at that aspect of the game, but she was still miles away from actually winning her first game...

I am a big believer in open Ideation with my current and prospective customers so that

1. I can build a vibrant Ideation community, with more eyes, views and opinions shared (in the end I will still translate what I see and prioritize my release backlogs, but the value of any Ideation system is only truly unlocked when it is open and embracing vs.when it is tightly controlled)
2. I incur zero admin overhead for membership management (I am busy, and I don't want to stand in the way of my end users who are willing to donate their time to help me build a better solution for them)

I support responsible Ideation - anyone making changes to Ideas (voting, commenting, submitting new ideas) should be authenticated. This allows moderation of online community behavior and generally understanding the participants better, e.g. if we want to interview someone to clarify or better understand where they are coming from.

We are often naïve worrying too much about our "evil" competitors. Truth is they are too busy fighting their own demons.. and if we lose to them it's not because we are open and transparent but because they move faster and develop better solutions for our customers.

We should be worrying more about our ability to execute better and about improving our company's brand appeal. This will make more for growing our business than trying to conceal our deficiencies. Open user communities, Ideation and even the user documentation shared publicly can help turn around sometimes dated and unfavorable perceptions about the vendor. Trust is a critical foundation for turning around stale brand perception (i.e. what our customers think of us), and being more transparent and embracing with our customers, partners and our own employees will go a long way in this endeavor.