I've never worked with external stakeholders, but have worked on internal operations tooling for the past few years and found talking to end users very rewardin

I've never worked with external stakeholders, but have worked on internal operations tooling for the past few years and found talking to end users very rewarding. I try to focus on problems (the things they run into every day and it's easy for them to talk about to help you identify gaps in your understanding) more than my solutions (asking too many questions or presenting something complicated can be mentally exhausting). You can sometimes save weeks of work when you talk directly to end users and understand that something that was in your original requirements, isn't really necessary.