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 m

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.