[mugsie]

Sounds like the manager was in over their head.

Engineering team will always have items that are very hard to estimate without doing background work.

A good manager would have said "what do we need to do to figure out times?" and then "Can we timebox that research to a sprint / two sprints / etc?" are reported the horizon one timescale up.

[hunglee2]

oh yeah sure, the guy was out of his depth, scrambling for numbers to support the story he was telling upstairs