A lot of this really resonates with me as a manager of dev teams, but once again the very unhelpful advice for "how do you figure out when you'll be done?" is "

A lot of this really resonates with me as a manager of dev teams, but once again the very unhelpful advice for "how do you figure out when you'll be done?" is "refuse to do it". If an executive is asking me when we will deliver something this is a completely valid question. It's how everyone outside software development lives. If lean aglie can't give me a way to shape expectation of what we're building AND answer the delivery question we're stuck with BS agile, or we might as well go back to waterfall which (accurate or not) has always been very clear with a delivery date.