I didn’t say it’s not about research. Let’s not play that game. I said that Ries says you need to research and talk to people, but he doesn’t explain the diff between good and bad research. He doesn’t teach you how to do the RIGHT research. That means people going out and asking the wrong questions to the wrong people will imagine THEY DID RESEARCH when they are helping themselves fail.

If you want to do things for the lowest cost possible, there are many ways to do that. I’m suggesting that we go for cutting the waste of guesses by bringing in more research earlier. People assume research is too expensive and not necessary. Then they spend how much money building the wrong thing, testing it on the public (possibly even testing it incorrectly), losing customers, losing potential investors, having to rebuild it.

We can pretend research is expensive, but who’s running the cost-benefit analysis of what cycles of guesses are costing versus knowing and building something better the first time?

And no, you don’t need to ship to test products on users. That’s part of what CX/UX does. If your product is going in the wrong direction, would you like to know that when UX has build a prototype or when engineers built it, shipped it, and the public saw it? Most people would pick the first, if they could.