To share or not?

Should the product teams submit their internal ideas for voting by their user communities or not?

This reminds me of the internal dilemma some A/A+ students face: to share or not, i.e. to always do their work in solitary mode or to join a study group. Personally, I've always believed I can only get better by sharing what I know. Sharing allows improving my knowledge and skills either through teaching what I know, responding to broader range of clarifying questions, or through a realization that my perceived understanding is not quite accurate.

Hence, I fully support the concept of posting internal ideas for voting and commenting by the user community.

If a potential product idea is misunderstood by the audience or not really seen as valuable it will receive few votes and will be buried by other more critical in the eyes of the user community enhancement requests. It's far better to find out early that what we think is valuable is actually not.

In addition to straight voting score, this approach also gives us the opportunity to hear back from the user community members in the form of comments, including clarifying questions, fine tuning points and additional use cases and scenarios.

As an added bonus, sharing internal ideas with our user community promotes a true two-way collaboration and trust between the product team and the customers and field.