[adrianratnapala]

You have to see it from the inside to be sure that this (rather than some other pathology) is going on, so I will give an example from my own work.

I wrote a design program for [thingys] that were basically rectangles, but could have circular arcs instead of straight line edges. A user could fake a circle using two semicircles joined by zero length edges.

The PM saw this and wanted a circular [thingy] feature. He could not understand that it was only a fake circle, such that when the user started changing things, (literal!) corner cases would crop up. Over time, he kept demanding new features that implicitly relied on non-fake circles. And of course this just kept throwing up more confusing corner cases that he kept trying to paper over with new features.

This is one example of a HUGE class of problems that come down to managers just wishing away a mismatch between the way data and code actually work, and the features that they would like to have.

[u801e]

Your example reminds me of this video [1] that (humorously) goes over a similar mismatch problem.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

[adrianratnapala]

Yes this is a classic, and I think I was first introduced to it when I was going through my fake-circle trauma. As ridiculous as it seems, it describes the real (mis)behaviour of people. But I feel there should be an equal and opposite video. Perhaps one where an engineer keeps producing solutions to problems nobody has. (An astroturf mower? A robot that goes to the gym for you?)

I think if you had both those videos and a convincing explanation of how they can both be truthful, the combination would great training material for everyone on a product team.

[skybrian]

I'm sure there's more to the story but it seems like there's a missing conversation here: "why don't we replace the fake circles with real circles?"

A healthy team would have that conversation. I'm not sure the PM needs to understand so much as defer to the engineering side if they decide a change is needed.

[adrianratnapala]

We'd had that conversation [1]; and (we thought) the answer was that real circles were not worth the extra complexity, especially since common use-cases could be covered by fake circles. Or at least we thought we'd had that conversation, but it turns out moot if the PM can't retain in is mind, the difference between fake and real circles.

I don't think deference to engineers is useful in this sort of thing. There is a class of people (PMs) who have the hard job of aligning user expectations with the engineered reality. They do this by guiding both the customers and engineers, and to do that, they must understand the real landscape they are guiding people through.

[1] I don't want to imply here that everything was the fault of the PM, it wasn't. But there was definately a class bad things that happened due to this particular kind of non-technical thinking.