In a lot of organizations I feel like #2 is often the difficulty. However, interestingly there is an opposite phenomenon where people are too focused on #2 (und

In a lot of organizations I feel like #2 is often the difficulty. However, interestingly there is an opposite phenomenon where people are too focused on #2 (understanding customer needs) and thus fail at #1 (owning implementation). I've seen it happen where non-technical users of internal tools request very specific features that get built just because and at whatever cost without the team asking what is the actual problem this feature solves and how can we best build something to address the problem given our knowledge of the technical side. It's often requests for tools that allow people to do things manually when the team should just spend some time automating away the need to manual intervention.