New features are often launched with partner companies, and then all the PMs have a real life example to go point at to convince their conservative stakeholders to adopt the new thingy. Looking at your power usage is not an apple thing, it's a power company thing to implement.

The way Apple product management works is that everyone is always demoing stuff up the chain and ultimately to Tim. They’re reverentially referred to as “Tim demos” internally. If Tim likes it, you get tons of resources.

The downside may be that in the pathological case you’re implementing stuff just for Tim. Another downside is you can’t really demo e.g. high-quality backwards-compatible SDKs to an exec.

The upside is you end up with a pretty coherent and un-fickle set of products. Unlike Google, Apple doesn’t have a roster of five (?) competing chat apps that it constantly changes.