[emeerson]

Strongly agree with this. Dates serve a critical goalpost in technical planning, yet they should be viewed as flexible (having a reasonable margin of error) and informed by tight & trust-driven feedback loops. I subscribe to Gantt charts as a planning tool, not a bible. Use it to empower development teams to plan and track execution, but don't use it for 0-margin accounting.

One anti-pattern in engineering management is shielding engineers entirely from timeline estimates. A CEO with limited runway, reporting to the Board, doesn't have such a luxury of infinitely elastic time.

Edit:

Note: dates should never be prioritized over value. If you're hitting dates and not delivering value then it won't do good for anyone. Product value should always be the function to optimize for, but rarely is it entirely independent of time.