I've also had great success sitting down with a real user for an hour and getting them to go through what they do. One particularly memorable product I did tha

I've also had great success sitting down with a real user for an hour and getting them to go through what they do. One particularly memorable product I did that with, I was sitting with a low level, call center type employee who was taking me through their daily job, and he pointed to a frequently needed report on screen and said "this is wrong though, I'll show you how we get the right report". He then proceeded to fire up SQL Server Management Studio, connected to the production db and ran a script he'd been given. All of them had read permission to the entire, extremely large, highly sensitive, db. Because that was apparently easier for one of the devs before me than fixing the bug. That company was bought for 9 figures a few months after that, just goes to show shoddy code and practices certainly isn't a reflection of value.