I think it is important to have someone looking at the user experience (by talking to users) separate from the system designers and coders.
When the designers/coders talk to users, they tend to look for confirmation that their design is correct, and ignore any evidence that users don't like it. Users that don't like their wonderful design are "stupid", stuck in the past and unwilling to change.
One sees this sometimes with Open Source software, where often there is no separate user experience team. I recently looked at a few issues in the Vivaldi (open source browser) forum, and where users suggested changes, their ideas were often dismissed without much discussion, sometimes quite rudely. You don't like our wonderful browser? Go back to Internet Explorer, you don't deserve anything better.