I'm not anywhere close to that part of the business, but I would be highly skeptical that she had much input at all. The kindle division, which this falls under, is highly command-and-control. Co-workers in the Kindle buildings say that they regularly see Jeff Bezos in their hallways (like 2-5 times a week), whereas I have only seen him once at a company meeting. Scope creep is a huge problem because you have dictator managers that all have their favorite feature that is priority 1, and there are so goddamn many of them. I wouldn't be surprised if some VP somewhere delayed the launch for a year just so they could launch with the cool-but-completely-useless 3d maps.

She was no doubt a part of the process, but there is no way she ran the show.

So what happened to the Amazon "Working Backwards" methodology of writing up a one-page PR release & customer FAQ, and working back from that to designing/creating the product? Wasn't that designed to reduce scope creep? Is Amazon still using that method?

Well, they probably did that and then subsequently ignored it. Happens all the time really.

For the most part, starting with the customer and working back is really successful. But we also have this sort of escalation culture where anybody above you can raise an issue that forces you to drop everything and answer the question. In general, its also a pretty good thing when it is truly used for "WTF you dunces, how did a customer get 100 boxes for their 100 unit order?" situations. But the power gets abused by a decent share of upper level managers like some sort of power trip. They interrupt major projects, take the steam out of sprints, and occasionally it forces major scope change. I just left an org where this was my sr manager's sole purpose in life. A shame, really...I really enjoyed my job but I wasn't allowed to do it.

That's quite enlightening. My comment was due to my industry-related naiveté. I thought a principal PM has the final say on both the features and the business side of a product. I didn't realize VPs add additional filters.

Principal is a job level. It is above Senior. A single product frequently has multiple Product Managers, some of whom are Senior PMs, some are Principal PMs, and some are "just" PMs. You could even have a Senior Principal PM.

Let's nip this trend in the butt. Outside the organization in question we really have no idea what's going on and who is or is not responsible for a particular poor outcome. It's not fair to the individual - or to the real executives who fucked up - to call out one person in this way.

(The expression is "nip it in the bud." Nipping in the butt is what a small dog with aggression problems will do to you.)