Speed is the whole point of an MVP, and skipping formal user research to hit a tight timeline is often the right call, not a mistake. The problem isn't skipping research, it's skipping it without knowing what's being traded away, and finding out the hard way after launch.
The step that gets skipped most often isn't broad market research, it's the much cheaper one: watching a handful of real target users actually try to use the product, or even just a clickable prototype of it, before writing production code. Five short sessions catch most of the confusing parts of an interface, reliably enough that usability research has treated five as a practical minimum for decades.
What that step actually catches is specific: places where the product's internal logic doesn't match how a new user's mental model works. A feature named accurately from an engineering perspective but confusingly from a user's perspective. A flow that makes sense once someone already understands the product, but is opaque on first use. These are invisible to the team building the product, because the team already understands its own logic; that's exactly why an outside perspective catches them.
The cost of skipping this step doesn't show up at launch, it shows up a few weeks later, as a pattern in support messages and drop-off rates that's hard to diagnose without already knowing what to look for. Fixing a confusing flow after real users have formed habits around working around it is a more expensive change than catching it before a single line of production code existed.
The honest tradeoff for a genuinely time-boxed MVP: five real user sessions on a prototype cost a day, not a week, and catch a large share of the confusion a full research process would find. Skipping research entirely to save that one day is rarely the shortcut it looks like once the cost shows up later in support load and rework.
