[anameaname]

This is what you get when you don't have a top-down management style. Teams are given too much freedom, leading to inconsistency. No one has the whole vision of how a product should work. Even if they did have that, they likely don't have the authority to make it happen.

[wpietri]

I doubt it. If anything, I think this is likely to be a symptom of too much top-down power. It smacks of high-level mandates and checklist features. There's some boss with a made-up, can't-miss release date who doesn't really look very closely at what gets produced, just as long as he can tell his boss that things shipped on time and to spec.

I've worked with some great, highly autonomous teams. What makes them work well is a strong emotional and informational connection to users. They do lots of user testing, so they can get inside a user's head. They try things out themselves, using what they've learned from talking to those users. And they keep an eye on production usage, because they really care that what they make delivers value and gets used.