The job description said: gather and document requirements.
The actual job was:
Work out why Finance, Operations and Customer Service all believed the system worked differently.
Find the spreadsheet that had quietly become part of the operating model.
Decide which exceptions genuinely protected customers and which ones simply survived because nobody had questioned them.
Then explain why reproducing every old workaround inside the new platform was not a migration strategy.
Those are not the same role.
In one, you write down what people tell you. In the other, you find out what the business can’t afford to lose.
A lot of searches skip that conversation, and I get why. The old brief is already approved, nobody has to argue about it, and the team needs someone yesterday. Reusing it feels like the careful option.
So you can end up with someone good at job one. Say three months in, they’re doing job two and wondering why nobody said. Nobody was hiding it. It just wasn’t in the brief. That’s three months of senior pay spent working out a job nobody described.
Often the person who knew the real job has just left. Ask them, or whoever sat next to them, what last Tuesday looked like.
