My belief is you should focus on understanding the problems your target users want to solve with your tool, and then design UX around making the product a power

My belief is you should focus on understanding the problems your target users want to solve with your tool, and then design UX around making the product a powerful and convenient tool for solving those problems. I agree! And, when I talk about "design," UI and UX are only one facet (because strategy, content, and technology are their own components in the larger design space). When I talk about "desire," I'm following Gause and Weinberg in Exploring Requirements, where they say, "[W]e don't know how to figure out what people need, as opposed to what they desire. ... We do observe, however, that by clarifying their desires, people sometimes clarify what they really need and don't need." In that sense, they are in agreement with your approach: determine the desires your users have (what do they want out of the product, what will the product help them do, etc), and then use that to inform their needs (here's what the product should specifically do or afford). Your experience designers then work with you on how to create experiences that effect the needs to address the desires. What I'm saying is, I think, that you're already thinking at a very sophisticated level in terms of design, it just sounds like your experience with design has been with organizations at a lower stage of process maturity.