Writings code has been viewed as an expensive part of development for a while. That's why the coding interview script the industry has adopted requires you to to not write any code until you suffenciently planned the whole problem.
Writing code is the easy part. Figuring out what your new feature or product should do is the hard part.
Maybe this is a paid feature that we're going to charge money for. Or we're going after a new market segment, or trying to take business from a rival. A new feature might have regulatory or legal requirements, somebody needs to understand all that.
At the very least, someone wants this new thing for a reason. You can't just guess, you actually have to talk to people and understand the problem domain lol.
I almost always have a pretty good idea of what I'm making and how I'm going to make it before I start.