The thing this otherwise excellent piece is missing is the importance of those customer research skills.

I'm a UX researcher from a market research background and have seen some astonishingly awful questions asked by people who have never been formally taught how to do research, and which result in misleading answers.

Essentially, I'm the person teams bring in after everyone else has had a go at talking to customers, the product isn't growing as it should and nobody knows why.

Almost immediately, I find out that the wrong questions were asked in the wrong way to the wrong people, and since the team misunderstood the user's needs, they built the wrong thing (or the right thing the wrong way).

It's usually straightforward to correct course, but it can take many months of hard work to (for example) redesign the UI.

Teams usually like to bring me in from the start after going through that.