I have felt and also heard from some of my colleagues that companies don’t take them or their inputs too seriously. Is this state any different in your company ?
My colleague and I started the user research process at our mid-size startup and we're still getting it established and scaled. It's been a minor uphill fight, since the culture is engineering-centric and folks sometimes fall into the pattern of believing that if the user doesn't understand the intent of the interface, then, the user's wrong. But they're also good enough at their jobs to know that good design is a competitive advantage, and so they've ultimately been responsive to the data we've gathered and the assumptions we're challenging with them. I'd say if people aren't taking the user research team seriously, they might need to reevaluate a few things, like: - how they're sharing out their research findings - how visible they're making the research data they're drawing their conclusions from - how much research they're doing with/on the engineers themselves. WHY don't they take their input seriously? what mental models are they using that conflict with research findings?
Amazon uses this kind of data extensively.