which is why a software project requires someone with technical knowledge doing the management, and not an MBA or "project manager" who cares only about on budget and on time at the cost of technical quality.
If you know the management is not technically competent, the responsibility also lies on the developer to communicate things on their level. If they ask how long will X take, you don't answer 1 day, and then another day to test it. You answer 2 days. If that's outside their budget then forget about that feature and let sales find a new feature they can sell that can be developed within the budget.
This also boils down to the ego thing, many junior developers are proud to give short estimates to show off how quick and good they are at their work. But those short estimates are always always always just the estimated time to get a quick prototype working, where things are configured as you go in the debugger, not something that is robust and will work together with the rest of the application in a customer deployed environment. Estimation is really where you can see the difference in an experienced engineer and a non experienced one.
TL;DR - you want to hire people who can adopt and who respect both sides (business, developers)
I work as devops and my boss always says that good operation/support people are hard to find. One can be a super hero in programming, but really bad at customer service or supporting production. Similarly some ops are very horrible at coding, but they are great system administrators.
With that, I have had product owners and product managers who are really excellent at managing team and able to cope the lack of technical skill by absorbing the technical knowledge from daily standup and eventually able to work with the team to prioritize technical challenge. For example this one product owner works in big data and he couldn't ssh without me showing him, but he could go over the pipelines just enough to make me feel embarrass. Of course, if you are on a project long enough you should know how things work in general.
On the contrary I have had really senior technical people leading teams and eventually got fired for their inability to lead.
In a business on-time and on budget are pretty damn important. I'd argue for most software disciplines (note: I didn't say all), probably more important than technical quality.
