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On the other side I have worked with PM/POs who have no clue and the developers are just telling them: "Oh this is super complicated you would not understand" or "This will take a long time to implement" and its a small feature.

There must be a balance. There must be some basic understanding by the PM/POs. They cant be the person that barley can use a computer.

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It also helps to be able to understand the tech enough to know if a certain approach is going to impact other initiatives which are further down the roadmap. One of my favourite questions I've been asked by a PM is "Will any of this work become easier to do if we change the order of these work items?"

I would have thought every manager asks such questions either to himself or to the team quite often.

Not in my experience - juggling priorities is usually difficult enough when you're just trying to manage the C-suite's favourite ideas, or feature requests from the highest revenue customer, etc. Factoring in synergistic engineering efforts is out of reach for a lot of PMs that I've worked with.

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