[scott_w]

I strongly disagree with this because it infantilises your PM to a ridiculous level.

You absolutely should explain (at a high level) what the constraints of your work are. If the PM doesn’t care, that’s a failing on their part. It’s their job to understand what’s possible within given timeframes and it’s your job as an engineer to explain that.

If a feature requires major architectural work to achieve, then make clear what that is in terms they can understand. “We need to migrate 30m records affecting 20,000 customers to this new system with 0 downtime” is understandable to most people in tech. It can also help focus minds on what we could change to make progress on or just validate a goal before fully committing.

For context, no plumber I know would talk shit about “platinum packages,” they’d just explain what the cause is and what’s making the correct fix so expensive.