It is difficult to explain to a division director that they do not have sufficeint capacity (enough qualified programmers) to compete features within a set time budget. The old joke goes, "It takes one woman nine months to produce a baby. But: what if we just put nine women in a room for one month!?"

In my professional consulting experience I've found most of those purported "hard deadlines" as mentioned above were usually arbitrarily defined, in other words: completely made up.

Yeah that never gets old. But it may be some features can be delivered in stages, maybe some can be solved other ways than intended that require less work.

If the org focuses on the customers one can work together to find a way.