Title: I suppose my own context is somewhat unique, in that we have a very technical product that&#x27;s used by other technical products. This means our customers are all effectively engineers. Some of these customers even used to work on our product.<p>Whenever we tell them, for example, the team has estimated it&#x27;ll take X weeks to do something, we continuously get pushback of: &quot;Why would it possibly take so long? All you have to do is A, B and C!&quot; (often providing incorrect solutions, increasing the burden of having to explain all possible implementation strategies to them and the risks involved with each step)<p>I&#x27;ve also experienced this in previous companies where managers, who used to be technical, do the same thing.<p>To me this is insanely disrespectful of the team, and it seems as though it&#x27;s a boundary violation on some level.<p>Has anyone found a healthy, emotionally mature response to this line of questioning? Ideally one that results in the customer understanding that they&#x27;re crossing a boundary of sorts here.<p>In an ideal world I&#x27;d much prefer to not have to give estimates in the first place, and rather involve our customers more frequently in our development process to help them see the progress. It&#x27;s hard, however, to convince them of the value in this approach.
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