[VyseofArcadia]

> what (and more importantly: why) the requirements are

Maybe in a startup? My experience as an IC in larger, more established companies is the requirements are dictated to you. Someone else has already thought carefully about the customer ask, your job is just to implement, maybe push back a little if the requirements they came up with are particularly unreasonable.

[bluGill]

If you dig deep you discover they have figured out some requirements in detail, but there is a lot missing. Is this new feature that last one in that line, or will there be more options in the future? Is this new feature really going to be used - many times we have put large effort into features only to discover no customer used them (as evidenced by the critical bug that made the feature unusable outside of the test lab that nobody complained about until 4 years had passed). These things drive how you engineer the thing in the first place.