I've been on the other side of this. We talked to this startup about their product and they claimed it had exactly the features we needed. We said fantastic and were ready and willing to hand over $10-20k to them for this, and they just kept stalling and making up excuses and demoing things that didn't actually do what we actually needed. Eventually they had to admit that they couldn't deliver the feature we needed. We were rather pissed off and cut all future dealings with them. They could have ended up with at least $50k from us over 2-3 years if they'd been honest and showed willingness to work with us, and instead they got zero.

Great example of how sacrificing integrity to potentially cut corners is long term self-defeating.

'Absolutely' is strongly affirmative wording. I'd say it's fraudulent even from an engineer deeply familiar with the level of effort. Language matters and executives should know better.

I know from personal experience it's hard to avoid speaking too quickly, yet it's also important to self correct in the moment. Otherwise why have such people on a call if they cannot communicate accurately and won't even admit when they misspeak?

Who is the “we” here? Because it sounds a lot like _you’re_ assuming it can be be built for the people who are going to be tasked with doing so.

My experience being a leader in similar situations is that when I say "we will have that in the next release", I mean "the engineers who are tasked with that will have completed it OR I will personally do it."

It absolutely is. What is wrong with you? It is really normal to lie to people on their face? I mean, you can perfectly say “The feature is not ready, but will be at X time” Ready, no need to be dishonest.