Almost all my death marches happened when the project is being authoritatively led by a non-engineer.<p>An engineer&#x27;s estimate is usually conservative. If someone says it&#x27;ll take 2 months, it&#x27;ll probably take <i>minimum</i> two months. If you have good engineers, they&#x27;re not trying to slack off by padding estimates. Respecting project estimates go a long way.<p>The right team also matters. In some, we had interns working on a key component. I&#x27;m not saying interns are bad, but generally you don&#x27;t want grumpy, underpaid people to work overtime.<p>The designer has to respect the engineers. If you do a design that sticks to guidelines or something like Material Design, you&#x27;ll be fine. But some designers try something really weird, in order to win an award, and some of those tiny details are pointless but would take 50% of the production time.<p>I actually did ragequit in most of those jobs. I know it sounds tantrum-y, but I&#x27;d say it rescued a lot of those projects. When you quit a well-paid job, the company immediately assumes that you have a very good reason to quit and starts listening. Then they allocate <i>some</i> resources, like a tester, dedicated designer, and the API guy sits with front end for those 100 hours straight.