But a manager might want to have at least a rough estimate of how much something costs before deciding what to buy. That is, they might want to know roughly how long something is going to take before deciding to put it as a high priority item.
It's not the manager's job to make technical decisions or choices of this nature, or at least it really shouldn't be.
The manager should be there to act as an umbrella and protect the engineers from the morons, the technical leadership leads the engineering team, and they make choices on what is high priority to get things done.
