I don’t know how I missed this!  In February, the Wall Street Journal posted a great article from Braden Kowitz, design partner at Google Ventures, titled Why You Should Listen to the Customer.  It contains lots of reasons why you need to conduct user research, and responses to many of the excuses against user research.  Here’s the intro:

“How can my company become great at design?” Founders ask me this question more than any other. They’re often considering hiring a hotshot designer or an expensive design agency. And while those might help, neither will bake design deep into how the company operates. Founders need a way to make great design become automatic, and there’s only one way I’ve found to do that reliably: invest time in listening to your customers.

Go read the whole thing, and then come tell me what user research you want to do.