Very well stated. My conclusion is the same: It may not have been comfortable or unambiguous every step of the way but basically all stakeholders win in this story.
Coming to “agreement” over a fiction isn’t okay. No amount of rationalization makes it “business”. More to the point, it is unnecessary. I hold there is harm here.
A different skillset is needed to negotiate from truth (“we need to confer with our building teams to estimate the full project timeline”) and still be persuasive. It’s not more difficult, and these these skills are not rare. They don’t get used in some environments (not many, certainly not most) because of culture, and at the ultimate expense of the leaders that set it.
Maybe the company won the deal because the CTO and CPO said "yep - we can do that in 12 weeks" whereas the competitor said "we need to confer with our building teams to estimate the full project timeline" and promptly lost the deal...
And maybe the company will lose the next deal, or the one after that, because the customer won’t give a reference; or because they took too many shortcuts and hosed the product; or they have so much technical debt the next project fails.
That’s the problem with this kind of kick-the-can-down-the-road thinking. At some point you get to the end of the road, at which point your competitors can come and kick you.
