TL; DR

There is no such thing as "always" in innovation.

Projects shouldn't "always start with the user," "always start with the market," "always start with the team," or any other "always ...".

There simply are projects that matter and projects that don't.

No project is perfect or satisfies all criteria we'd love for them to have. As a result, cherry-picking for a perfect starting point means that you give up on other aspects that you can't afford to lose, things like meaning, chances of success, ... and credibility.

In other words: The more picky you are about project starting point, the more likely you are to fail.

A better way is simply to accept interesting, meaningful problems as you encounter them, to accept the shape in which are, and then simply to make it the first step of your work to move from where you actually are toward what you might consider a cleaner starting point. That point then is no longer your official start. Instead, it becomes your first in-progress milestone. It's at this "step 2" that it makes sense for us to have strong opinions.

By the way, this is the way we (hopefully) live most of our lives.

E.g., when we first have children, we don't get to mandate who they are born as (their "starting point"). Instead, we can only try to help them to grow up from the person they start being into a person who can find their way in the world.

Similarly, we don't choose our vacations from some "perfect" starting point. Instead, we have to accept the date range that is realistic, our general budget, our physical abilities, our family members needs, and more. Moreover, any one of these dimensions might be most important to any one vacation. Only then, as a "second step," do we plan vacations that work with the starting point that the universe imposed on us.

Innovation is no different.