[ryanbrunner]

In my experience there's two main reasons that orgs outside engineering / product want estimates:

1. Coordination of external dependencies. Stuff like product marketing, sales training, documentation, etc. as well as sometimes things external to the company like customer commitments or sales commitments. These are for the most part legitimate, although in many cases the deadline doesn't need to be known at the outset of development, and too many of these is a very unhealthy sign.

2. Accountability / improved productivity - This usually manifests as an exec feeling that engineering is running too slowly / inefficiently, and by asking for deadlines (and often compressing them to "push" the team) they can improve productivity. These are almost always in my mind completely counterproductive, and there's much better ways to accomplish this.