It can work. There does need to be mutual trust between product leadership and engineering. e.g. in the case you described, the engineers need to be able to co

It can work. There does need to be mutual trust between product leadership and engineering. e.g. in the case you described, the engineers need to be able to communicate without fear that X1 and X2 are basically the same engineering work as X, and still can't be accommodated, and the other side needs to trust that they are not just being lazy.