A key difference that I have noticed between tech startups and the mature company I used to work for is that I'm encountering a lot of people with relatively little work experience who have only ever done one thing and only ever learned about their own area.

If you have, say, a degree in finance AND an MBA, you don't just know about finance, you know about operations and marketing (and strategy), too - so when you get people with that more holistic understanding of the business and people with a very specialised knowledge in one area, the latter are inevitably going to find themselves sidelined in discussions because they very simply don't understand what everyone else is talking about.

Even professional qualifications such as the Chartered Institute of Marketing diplomas go beyond the domain basics (how to write an unbiased survey) into other areas (how to write a strategy plan, how to manage stakeholders). UX seems to lack that for-want-of-a-better-word professionalism - there's no go-to qualification, no guarantee of skills acquired, and an abundance of practitioners who don't know how to weave their own expertise into the tapestry of everyone else's.

As to whether you can develop a good product without understanding your customers, yeah you can. With luck. I mean, 92% fail, but 8% happen to fluke it and coincide with what's required.

But if you want your NEXT product to win, you'll need to understand why anyone might want to buy it, which requires 'customer insights' rather than just UX or market research.

That's why it's called Competing Against Luck.