I'm pretty sure every engineering field calls it designing. Perhaps software devs feel a need to inflate what they actually do.
In construction, architects and designers do different jobs. The software equivalents of those roles map reasonably well to the construction equivalents.
Well, Agile, Scrum, and backlogs took care of that. /s
Anyway, "you sit down and think before you build" is indeed what you want and the word for that is "strategy".