[gjmulhol]

Apple has Engineering Program Managers which manage the product build. Sure, vision and design are provided by others, by the EPM (and other titles I'm sure) are communication cruxes.

What products to build is decided by the exec team. What they look like is determined by industrial design. Engineering has little to no say in what actually gets built.

The idea that someone with the title Product Manager is going to be making a final decision on product vision is pretty narrow minded. Google does have Product Managers, but it has many on every product. Just because you are not managing an entire product line does not mean you are not managing product. I think once you get outside Tim Cook and Jony Ive (and maybe a few select others) at Apple, you are too low on the totem pole to be able to make any sort of long term product visioning decision.

Edit: And if you disagree about Apple, fine, I will rescind that example and continue to assert that product managers are very important in most organizations to balance the preferences of many players in trying to make a product a success.