The system they work in all day.

Nobody asks for new software because they want new software. They ask because the business has outgrown how the work gets done — too many manual steps, too many disconnected tools, too much depending on the few people who know how it all fits together.

That means the brief is rarely the whole requirement. The real one sits in how the job is actually done, and the only way to reach it is to spend time with the people doing it — before the architecture, not after.

The test of this work is not whether it launches. It is whether the people who do the job stop working around it.