No matter what the project is, the first thing I do is what I call "flying a kite across the chasm" - meaning what ever is the purpose of the software, I create

No matter what the project is, the first thing I do is what I call "flying a kite across the chasm" - meaning what ever is the purpose of the software, I create the barest implementation of "user starts working" to "user has completed their work" which is the purpose of the software. This is not a GUI or anything a user would use, it is the data transformation from input to final raw output. Once that is in place, the overall stress of "can it be done?" is answered and the rest is being smart about filling out the details. FWIW, my career has been in research, where I'm answering "can it be done?", "can it be scaled?", "can it be financed?" types of questions.