The only thing that’s ever worked for me to avoid these scenarios is getting all the relevant stakeholders physically in a room for a couple days and drawing mo

The only thing that’s ever worked for me to avoid these scenarios is getting all the relevant stakeholders physically in a room for a couple days and drawing mockups, looking at their systems, learning the domain lingo, running reports over their data, etc as we go. Otherwise the domain knowledge for a proper solution just isn’t there, even for a ‘simple’ project. Unfortunately I also hated every minute of doing this and have switched to a back-end job where I never have to interact with a customer again!