[motohagiography]

Question I would have is, why didn't the product manager know that those reviews mattered to his competitor's marketing team and CEO as a differentiator, and why weren't those competitor features already tracked on their roadmap?

This PM seems like an A-player, but he was caught flat footed, hence the "?"

The "?" email means you dropped a ball. If I were doing an armchair RCA on it, I'd posit the problem was a disconnect in the relationship between Product and Marketing, where marketing would have already known they were getting hammered on reviews - and that they mattered - but Product was probably indexed on the wrong stakeholders, likely in the engineering org given, a) that the PM could code at all meant eng was still his comfort zone, and b) the focus on being seen to ship a release. My read of it was he dropped the ball because he backed the wrong horse and misunderstood the priorities of the company. Of course you drop everything to fix it, you f'd up.

Unfortunately, just sending "?" emails to staff doesn't create the culture where they are meaningful. Sending "?" messages doesn't make you Jeff Bezos. I'd argue they are an artifact of a very specific local culture in AMZN. If managers in other orgs imitated that aspect of it, thinking now they're doing the real Bezo-ing, they would be just doing a cargo cult management ritual.