Worked in a position as a nominal 'team lead' for a couple years. Small group, as they got funded and grew, more management and ceremony kept creeping in, and... we had more planning/estimating meetings.

I was asked a few times "when will this be done? We need to know when X will be done".

So... already, I'm bristling because we don't have a shared definition of 'done'. My pushback was... probably seen as not helpful/aggressive/whatever, but I responded with something like:

"I can't tell you specifically, because I don't have control over all the people and processes that get us to 'done', meaning it's tested/reviewed/deployed".

At that point in time, I already had code developed locally with tests, and had pushed up something sitting on an ephemeral dev branch for others to poke/test/verify.

"What do you mean you can't be specific? We need a date".

"OK... Oct 28" (at the time, it was 2 calendar weeks away).

"Well... I can't trust anything you say at this point - I'm going to say Nov 9".

Pissed me off to no end because... why ask if you turn around and say "I do not trust anything you say"?

I tried explaining further:

"We have to have an internal code review, some internal testing, some testing with the client on this feature, some testing of it merged in with everything else, then a deploy. All of these involve other people. I've asked multiple times for the people responsible for these to pick up the task and give me any necessary feedback. 3 of them have told me 'Not now, MrX told me ABC is my highest priority', so... short of you, MrX, telling them to cooperate with me ahead of the other items, I have no ability to move this forward. It's been ready/sitting/waiting for 3 days already, but without some explicit authority from you telling other people to take this task seriously, and prioritize it and cooperate with me, I can not give a date when it will be 'done', because I don't control 'done'. The entire group does, and they're all politely telling me it's their lowest priority, on your order."

I got some reply along the lines of "now you're just being argumentative and pedantic!"

Me: "I could roll it out now - I'm relatively confident in the code, docs and tests I have in place, but our process is steps ABC, then XYZ, and other people who are not me are tasked with that. If I roll it out now, I'm violating the group process/agreement, and this will be seen as aggressive, or passive-aggressive, or 'non-team-player', etc. So... it could be 'done' tomorrow, but not through normal processes."

"No, we have processes in place for a reason, we have to follow those".

Me: "OK... so, if my code is dependent on people who can deprioritize or skip over or ignore any requests I ask of them (many were documented in tickets as 'waiting on personX')... how can I both follow the process, and give you a specific date when something will be 'done'? I can not."

I was so frustrated here because the 'process' was brought in to 'make things better', but it spread everyone too thin. We (group of 4-5) had routinely been missing estimated delivery dates for months - it got worse after new processes, not better (but we put more in jira, so there were nicer charts showing how bad it was getting week to week!).

We just went around in circles for another 5 minutes or so then I left the meeting. It was a constant state of feeling like I'm being talked down to, and "I can't trust anything you say".

I get it - people need some degree of estimates/delivery dates. Extra 'agile' processes along with spreading people too thin, siloing people, then ignoring the day to day impact - none of this was good.

This was a few years ago - I've thought some more about how I might handle that differently if it comes up again, but I keep coming back to "avoid projects/teams/processes like that again" as the easiest path. I'm not sure there's any productive way to get out of the logical 'rock and a hard place' that ended up being (from my POV).

It boiled down to "give us a specific date on something which requires multiple other people who you have no control/authority over, and whom I've also told to ignore you and/or deprioritize your requests". The only options seemed to be

a. give me control over those other people needed to follow the process

b. bring in more people to help follow the process

c. allow me to bypass the current process

FWIW, someone else got wind of this on the client end and we collaboratively did option C a few days later, and it was just rolled out (to the client's satisfaction) well before the end of October.