In my experience it does not go without saying that a project needs a goal. Not a list of acceptance criteria or next steps, but WHY are we doing what's being asked. It's staggering how many times I've seen entire projects without a clearly defined goal or problem statement, and after 3 months the work was shelved. Management simply shrugged it off as, "That's business for you -- targets move," when plenty of people on the front line were unsure what the point was and it would've taken a 10 min convo with the intended audience to learn that the feature was nowhere in their top 10 and they'll never use it.