One of the biggest time wasters is when the request doesn't come with the context. It's like they try to save time by keeping everything on a need to know basis

One of the biggest time wasters is when the request doesn't come with the context. It's like they try to save time by keeping everything on a need to know basis but the "why" or the context is a really important aspect of providing a good solution because without that you don't know what they've thought of beforehand. For example, "we need to block requests from X country". No problem, that's easy enough with most firewall services but why are we doing it? If it's to make contractual guarantees that no traffic will originate from that country then that's not going to work because anyone can easily bypass country code detection mechanisms in 2 minutes with a VPN.