Is UX Research too often the method of last resort?

UX research is expensive and will delay us, so the argument goes.

Rather than taking time to understand the target customer, it is much better to launch a MVP directly onto the market, and test it there (never mind that it is quite a lot more expensive). After all, we know our users and have good intuition, solid data, a lot of social media comments, and AI-empowered insights and personas.

And I, founder or marketing director, am a perfect example of our ideal customer: if it makes sense to me, it will make sense to many.

By the way, our PM can do everything these days: from Figma designs to content, UX and a bit of AI-supported desk research.

And our market is changing too fast: better to be there tomorrow than taking the time to do things more thoroughly.

[More on this in the debate here (check the comment by Kim Lenox )].

It all brings us to a world where solid UX research is increasingly less used. After all, the argument continues, it is a design technique, and design is not that special anymore (as per Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino ).

This way of thinking is of course a fallacy. If companies want to propose something that customers will value, they'd better understand how customers perceive that value, and adjust their product accordingly, thus avoiding costly launches of poorly conceived products.

Yet it is also a corporate dogma, increasingly affecting many industries that ought to know better, and would never apply the same logic to e.g. engineering. It even affects companies where the time horizon is longer, like those active in health, finance, energy or government services.

This fashion will subside. Already some companies are coming to us to understand the "why", after having tried out all of the above and still not having customer buy-in.