Smart city initiatives, driven by Information and Communication Technology, are globally developing for citizen-centric urban improvement. However, these endeavors often overlook citizens as end-users, despite evidence of the benefits of user-centric software development. This paper presents an approach for engaging citizens in the requirements elicitation process by conducting focus group workshops, fostering citizen centricity, and promoting technology acceptance. We apply our research in a city that is developing data-driven traffic management applications to become a smart city. Our results show that these workshops can be very productive and result in a notable quantity of requirements that represent citizens’ needs and can help in the conceptualization of such data-driven applications. They further underscore the opportunities of citizen involvement in smart city initiatives. With these insights, we strive to advance the field of user-centric software design and citizen involvement, aligning smart city development more closely with the needs of its residents.