After reading Creative Selection I’m wondering if Apple has a Product Owner/manager on each team or if the team has only engineers and designers, led by an engineering manager? Put another way, is there a product org that is separate from engineering, or is that the marketing org?
No. Product decisions are a shared responsibility and involve all the responsible groups. We don’t divorce engineering from decisions about the product. We also don’t let engineering own the roadmap themselves either. In SWE, we do have a project management org that helps teams make some types of product decisions, but at the end the people writing the code have a large role in deciding what we ship. Along with design, management, marketing and project managers.