Usability, shared resources, and "ownership"

Who "owns" the user experience at your company?  Marketing?  Product?  No one?

The single most important factor in usability success is not the expertise of your team, the market you're in, or even how well you know your users. It's your business process.  Gather user requirements before starting design, integrate usability early in your development cycle, and feed user input back into the process to start anew for the next version.

To get the most out of usability, it's something that ought to be on everyone's mind. Your marketing and sales groups need to consider it just as product design and development do. So evangelize, post up diagrams and articles, frame personas ... whatever it takes to make your peers think about usability!