You make the pragmatic choice. Compress discovery to one week. Make educated assumptions. Document all the risks. Start building.
"We'll validate as we go," you tell the team. They look uncertain but start coding.
Week 3: You show the first prototype to stakeholders. They stare at it in confused silence.
"This isn't what we asked for," Marketing says.
"We never said we wanted it to work like THIS," Sales adds.
"Did anyone actually talk to Legal?" Legal asks. (Nobody did.)
Turns out your assumptions were... creative. The data model doesn't match how the business actually works. The user flow assumes a process that doesn't exist. The integrations connect to systems that are being deprecated.
Week 4: Complete UI redesign required. The developers are rebuilding from scratch.
Week 6: Second prototype. Still wrong. Different wrong, but wrong.
Week 8: The team is demoralized. They've built the same features three times. Your lead developer's LinkedIn now says "Open to ANYTHING."
Week 12: You're behind schedule and the prototype still doesn't match requirements because the requirements were never properly gathered.
The CEO asks why this is taking so long. You explain about the discovery phase you skipped. "Maybe we should have done that," they muse.