Why do product teams need deadlines?

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about the ways product teams can set deadlines. Although in general it was well-received, one opinion came up several times in responses on Medium and Hacker News. And that perspective was “why do we even need deadlines?”

In my experience, this is something that I hear with some frequency from engineers, so I figure that it makes sense to address it. The reasoning behind this viewpoint is that products and features are ready when they are ready, and it doesn’t make sense to push to an arbitrary release date. This perspective sometimes includes an invocation of Agile methodologies, where features can be broken up and released in small increments that are individually useful. While I think there is some merit to these arguments, at least with regards to not pushing out half-baked features just to hit a deadline, there are still important reasons to set deadlines.

Deadlines allow you to meet dependencies

The first reason to set a deadline is when a product or feature has an external dependency. Many early-stage startups consist mostly of engineers and maybe have a few sales people. They typically launch features as they are ready, because there isn’t necessarily much demand for the product. But as companies grow and start to have paying customers, they scale up…