[tikhonj]

The main point of this article is that you need fake deadlines so that people don't take too much time working on things—and that's simply not true. The best teams I worked on did not have fake deadlines but still moved fast (noticeably faster than peer teams in the same org) because we felt real ownership over what we were doing; intrinsic motivation is far stronger than extrinsic motivation.

If you actually trust the people doing the work—and if you fervently believe in Parkinson's Law, you don't—you wouldn't reach for fake deadlines, you would just ask people for what you need, and give them enough context to persuade them.

You can just go and ask: "how can we get something useful out faster so that downstream team X can start experimenting with our system?". As long as you trust the team and you've managed to get the team to trust you, why wouldn't they try to do that?

I mean, there might be some real reasons not to hurry in any specific situation, but if there are you would talk about it. And maybe those reasons are strong enough that you shouldn't be trying to get something out faster just then! Or maybe there's a mismatch in your understanding of the situation that needs to be sorted out. Or maybe the team really does need to change their approach to get something out faster, even if there are real costs to doing that. Getting to that conclusion bottom-up with the team is going to be way more productive, less stressful and less trust-destroying than imposing and then missing fake deadlines.