The End of Navel Gazing: Paul Adams, UX London 2018.
Most designers focus on their bubble
What's usually at the centre is the leadership team and they talk, and depending on their background, certain teams may have more influence
Different teams may talk to different other teams and each area has their own subsets, not just design and research
Things I believed before being in the leadership team
They don't talk to sell, they talk to understand and learn and find out the problems people have, the features that they're missing and the ways the product is confusing
We found out from our sales team there was a feature people wanted and that a competitor had, but it was a hard design problem to solve so we had 3 options in this ongoing real project...
The question is then, "what should we do?" if you ask different teams, you'll get different answers. The reason leadership and Sales will pick option one is because we can sell it. It doesn't matter if it's hard to use, we can fix that later. Leadership will think this because they care about the financial health of the company. The reason sales people care is because a lot of them are comp'ed on sales.