This is all true and accurate.
But it ignores a few things.
First and foremost, it ignores just how much work is actually a "project" and not a "product". A "product" can do a CI/CD model, can last months, years, or decades after initial release, and very rarely has compelling events demanding certain deadlines to be met. If the "upload a picture and tag your friends" feature arrives next week, next month, or next year is not likely to have a material impact on the business or the bottom line.
"Projects" are a totally different beast. There is a roughly defined feature list and once that list is checked off, the demand for work greatly scales back. You've built the "OSHA requires us to record when we calibrate this piece of equipment app", it's done, and other than the occasional change to switch from internal Active Directory authentication to Okta or "hey, can the 'Notes' field be 10,000 characters not 500?" request or whatever... it's done. However, that project has compelling events like "the law takes effect on June 3rd so we must be live before then" or "our license to our current application expires on August 10th so we need to be live by July 1 to give us ample cutover time". Or there is a very strong ROI level where the timeline = budget and blow the budget and there is a lot less reason to build it... "this app is going to save us $200k/year so if it costs us more than $500k there is not much reason for us to do this project", you really can't just give a development team a black check to "go take as long as it needs to take", you need to know before you authorize the project, to have a very strong estimate and stick to it.
Even product teams have to deal with this! If sales estimates that Feature X will increase sales by $500k/year, the team can't spend more than $1m or $1.5m or whatever building Feature X or else it won't be worth it.
So yeah, as much as development teams want to sit there and say "but we all know estimates are fake so why are you demanding them?" it is completely unrealistic to do that. Is it asking for the impossible? Maybe, maybe not. History certainly makes it clear that *most* teams botch this - and badly.
But insisting that businesses don't need what they most obviously need is just fantasy.
J.Ja
