I often see takes on this topic from the engineering side. "It's hard!". "Managers just don't understand".

It feels like as a community, it would be useful to get more articles seeing things from the other side and exploring functional approaches beyond provide-a-worst-case-scenario-estimate.

There's a reason this dynamic is so pervasive. In order for everyone in an organization to do their job well, people do often need a realistic set of estimates. Can sales promise the prospect this integration? Can marketing plan a launch for the new feature? Can the CPO make a reasonable bet on a new line of work?

In my experience, the nuance here is more about handling the mis-estimates. How do we discuss the risks up front? How much work should we put into contingency planning? How do we handle the weeks / months before a deadline when it is clear that we need to limit scope?

This is it. I'm a hardcore engineer at heart who has a lot of these sales, marketing, and product folks as friends, and can attest to the fact that they also have constraints.

The whole world runs on deadlines and timelines. Even a president is elected for a specific duration. If you're in a B2B setting, the customer demands (sometimes even contractually binding) at least the Quarter when something will be delivered.

Time is the only common denominator by which different activities can be coordinated. Without some heed to time, there will be no coherence.