[awillen]

PM here: I agree completely. A lot of PMs aren't great with phrasing requests, and they come off sounding way more urgent than they are. I used to be guilty of this, and I thought it was great how responsive the engineers were until a manager told me I was disrupting their schedules with all of my urgent requests. We solved that one pretty quickly by agreeing I'd specify the timeline for eng requests, and for things that were big and urgent, I'd check with team lead/manager before asking. If any of those engineers had asked me how urgent things were, we wouldn't have run into that problem (which is not to say it's their fault - it was my job to give that context - just to say that an inexperienced PM won't mind you asking about timing/urgency at all and you may save him issues down the line).