If you get this pushback from a few of your customers, you should probably just politely explain the reasoning behind your time estimates. If you get this push

If you get this pushback from a few of your customers, you should probably just politely explain the reasoning behind your time estimates. If you get this pushback from most of your customers, that means your team is widely perceived as underperforming. If you're the manager or a leader on the team, you should do something about this. First, you have to be honest with yourself. Maybe your team is underperforming because of the people on the team. Maybe some of the engineers on the team are underperforming, because they aren't able to meet the standards of your organization, and they should be managed out. There are a couple other possibilities. Your team could be underperforming because it lacks some underlying infrastructure. For example, minor changes might take too long because the test infrastructure is too slow. You might be dependent on some other team which is too slow. You might really need to invest some effort in improving underlying automation. The right course of action depends on the underlying facts, but basically, maybe there is some medium-term plan that can improve this, and you should figure out how to do it. The final possibility is that there's nothing you can do except communicate better that people should lower their expectations of your team. Just mentally prepare yourself to have a lot of this sort of conversation forever.