This and so much this. To elaborate on your point, say a programmer and a designer brainstorm an amazing new jetpack feature for the game. They spend a day (w

This and so much this. To elaborate on your point, say a programmer and a designer brainstorm an amazing new jetpack feature for the game. They spend a day (when they should be working on less interesting but planned features) on a quick first pass and show it to their PM. The PM asks how long it will take to complete, they say 3 weeks (2 days of UI/UX time to add the fuel bar, a week to tweak the feel and mechanic, 2 days of FX artist time, 2 days of artist time to make the rocket pack model). The PM says that the feature is unplanned and that is too long, so they say they can cut some corners because they really want the feature in and its more interesting than working on their planned tasks. The PM agrees because he wants the team to be creative and take control and pride over how great their game is. In the end the feature stays in and takes 2 months of development time since it requires modifications to world collision geometry, each selectable player needs a differently modeled jetpack to fit their geometry, a jetpack upgrade system is added, loot box unlockable color customization gets introduced, bots need to be able to fly too and so pathing and behaviors need extensive modification, a tutorial needs adding, sound effects need designing and adding, QA has to do a pass of finding everywhere in the world that the jetpack can be used to get out-of-bounds and to avoid gameplay trigger volumes, and someone has to triage and fix all those issues. And I realized I probably vastly underestimated... do we slip, missing being part of this quarters revenue and cancelling our ad-campaign or have we just pushed into development hell?