This post was originally titled Finding a New Way with Your Product Roadmap, but that seemed a tad mundane when you're trying to imply that the importance of Innovation and Transparency goes beyond Requirements Management.

A talent for bluffing and obfuscation comes in handy when playing poker. If you're good at it, you can amass a hefty personal fortune.

Now imagine a poker table with marketing, engineering, finance and the Blue Sky team each sitting around trying to outwit one another.

Regrettably, too many companies behave this way when it comes to product innovation and development. Individuals and departments try to win executive favor, budget dollars and personal power at the expense of customer value and company success.

In that kind of environment, product team members will make unilateral decisions... ignore agreed-to decisions... compete against each other... and blame each other. They'll hold their cards close to the vest by maintaining program data in spreadsheets and static documents, declaring them unavailable to others on the product team. Innovation expert Paul Sloane has blogged that this kind of internal politics "can reach the ridiculous stage where the enemy is seen as another department inside rather than the competitors outside."

This situation leads us to the second ingredient in this series of posts on transforming the innovation process: Replace the many truths with a single, shared truth.