Up-front user research is comforting because it hands off the responsibility of making decisions. Any time a difficult decision needs to be made, designers and product managers can simply refer to work that was done months ago (which is potentially now irrelevant). The research can act as a safety net. If the product or feature doesnt work out after launch, the team members arent responsible; they were simply following the research. But research can give teams a false sense of securitya feeling that theyre not making the decisions, that the research has predetermined what will happen.
Heres the thing: In the best companies in the world, the companies that make the products everyone uses, a huge amount of the innovation comes from simply making assumptions, building something, testing it, and iterating based on real user feedback. Do you think that Slack came about after a lengthy discovery phase? How about Google Hangouts, Gmail, or the Kindle?
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