The planning phase is the foundation for all other phases of the project to come. A strong and detailed planning phase is essential to the success of the project. As mentioned, customer needs are a large and important role of the planning phase as they are the key to assessing what your product, in the end, needs to require. However, as was mentioned, vague customer needs can lead to large problems down the road. With important customer needs, if they are vague, it can easily cause a very slowed down design process as decisions that should have been made in the planning phase come up later. For this reason, I think it is imperative that in the planning phase, these vague customer needs are ironed out into a finite set of design requirements for the product in order to drastically increase the efficiency of the design process. Does anyone have experience working on a project with a very vague set of customer needs that caused problems down the line?