Fair point. I agree with what you've said here with respect to most large corporations ("enterprise"). Generally, I think designers are better trained to think like this than engineers. Either way, this is the way I think both crafts need to evolve: both engineering and design should aim towards more of a core focus on the product, rather than just their individual pieces.
The startup world is certainly leading the charge in this right now, though I think it's often mischaracterized as a resource constraint problem, one that will presumably be solved down the road by hiring a proper product manager when the company needs to "scale". Training all employees to think strategically about business and product is a universally good thing, but especially for those building the products, especially when the software is the product.
As far as how well the system "scales", I suppose it depends on your definition of scale ;) Facebook seems to be doing pretty well with some version of this approach, and I think they're at about 3-4k employees, at least half of those are technical afaik.
The startup world is certainly leading the charge in this right now, though I think it's often mischaracterized as a resource constraint problem, one that will presumably be solved down the road by hiring a proper product manager when the company needs to "scale". Training all employees to think strategically about business and product is a universally good thing, but especially for those building the products, especially when the software is the product.
As far as how well the system "scales", I suppose it depends on your definition of scale ;) Facebook seems to be doing pretty well with some version of this approach, and I think they're at about 3-4k employees, at least half of those are technical afaik.