It depends what you are working on, how you ship and how three rest of the company works. I work on Enterprise software that's not SaaS. We ship every 9-12 months. If we do it more frequently it just annoys our slow-moving costumers and increases our support burden because there are now more versions in support that might need patches. Our sales and marketing teams need to know when we ship. Sometimes costumers mighy need to adjust their own release schedules to when our next release is out. If one team needs longer for a critical feature, we need to know as early as possible so that we can discuss cutting scope, pushing the release out, cutting the feature, etc.
Yep, or if you are working on a project to build a control system for a new factory which is going live in 18 months, it's pretty reasonable for your management team to want to know that you have confidence you can build the control system within a year.
If not, they will probably want to cut the scope or put other risk mitigation in place.
