The 5 most common mistakes of managers and how to avoid them

Manager.dev

Setting challenging deadlines can lead to better results in engineering projects by managing the Iron Triangle of scope, resources, and time. Effective deadlines create a sense of urgency and prevent scope creep. It's important to communicate clearly with the team, involve them in decision making, and maintain a balance between pushing them to meet deadlines and being flexible with unforeseen changes. A healthy environment allows teams to thrive under deadlines, fostering innovation and creativity.

Using fake deadlines without driving your engineers crazy

On Parkinson’s law and the Iron Triangle

Yes deadlines are good, but they are not for engineers only, and will not lead to better results if the scope is fixed or worse keeps growing.
Deadlines should be set for the whole delivery team. This basic fact is still not clear to many organizations.
As it is mentioned in the post, the point is to get the team focused and deadlines is an excellent way to implement it. There may be other ways to get the same output, and managers must try different solutions including setting deadlines.
Deadlines should be communicated to not only within the team but any other team that works with that team. If deadlines are not met, take a system view of the whole workflow and fix the system. Many times the conclusion is that a team is slow.
Deadlines are good, but everyone, but must understand their purpose, otherwise, it will lead to burnout and the system will be in the same rotten state.

I agree with one point in this post:
“As a developer, fake deadlines drove me crazy.”
But “challenging” deadlines are very different from “fake” deadlines.
One is based on metrics and past performances - the other is nothing more than a lie. If you’re a manager that lies to your employees, you should be herded up with all the other lying managers, brought out to a high cliff, and…