In 4 separate emails today I wrote something along the lines of:
As far as a date for this, we don’t have any. The next thing up for us is [project X] but we’re still ironing out exactly what that means. We can’t even estimate the work with any kind of accurately until we break it down. If we broke down every request that came in to where we could accurately estimate it, we’d never develop anything. Also, it’s almost assured that priorities will change before we finish what we’re working on now. Here’s a link to the roadmap, that’s the best I can do.
I give that response so much I should just attach it to my email signature. I do it in the hopes that if I repeat it enough then it might start to sink in. I drive my boss insane when I do things like this, yet I won’t give it up. It’s a difficult thing to sell the idea that dates are not important, especially when you work for a company where almost all of the senior management staff come from backgrounds other than software. To me, it seems insane to look back on a long history of missed dates which were arbitrarily given by someone who didn’t fully understand what work was required and demand we keep doing it.