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Empathy is the engine that drives design. When we know who our stakeholders are and how they hope the software will help them, we will make better design decisions on their behalf. Business goals are a straightforward way to help the team internalize stakeholders’ hopes and dreams for the software.

Knowing who the stakeholders are and understanding the business goals is important but doesn’t tell us what the software should do or how it is expected to behave. We capture this information as requirements. Architects need different information than what traditional requirements specifications typically offer. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to look at requirements from the perspective of software architecture.