hipppocamp

I was wondering the same thing. I suspect that Apple has a strong top-down culture that's been set by Steve Jobs, so you likely have a "single-threaded owner" model, regardless of how the org chart really looks. Companies that rely on more distributed models where you have peers that have final say over their product decisions end up with splintering and features that don't align well.

> I think it’s often better to divide up the product over many separate small teams, each with a product focused “mini CEO” and a tech focused “mini CTO”.

This only gets you so far. It tends to optimize for speed of teams but at the detriment of the overall product.

Eventually you end up with splintering of ideas, terminology, duplicate functionality and features that almost work the same way. You see it across all big companies and products. AWS is a great example of the mess they've made between services and how they don't always play well together and you end up with teams actually competing as they assert that their product should own something that's others shouldn't. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is in the same mess (Drive is a fucking cluster of a mess and it's basically impossible to use for anything productivity related - and don't get me started on how Google Classroom works within that ecosystem that's a double yikes). Same goes for Atlassian. What's the saying? Don't ship your org chart?