[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.