Now that I use the new one I'm wondering what the long wait was for. The search stuff is ok, but I don't really see anything else besides that and the new look. It's much slower than the old one. =/ I hope they plan to roll out more because this is pretty lackluster considering how long they've been talking about it.

Someday I'll have to tell the whole story.

Suffice it for now that the separation between product and engineering makes neither better.

What do 'product' do? The actual design, which is then handed over to engineering for implementation?

Something like that, yes.

There's Product Managers, Project Managers, Program Managers, Engineering managers.

I think what happens is you have Product guys on one hand and Developers on the other.

Engineering is inbetween and consists of the calculus of tradeoffs both from the technology and from functionality. Most of the people with "engineer" in their title are really developers, that just implement.

Then again, all this Silicon Valley software company mumbo jumbo is new to me -- I'm still somewhat new to this industry...

would Product Engineers be the right set of folks to lead such initiatives?

Didn't Yahoo make them rewrite it from Perl to PHP... probably accounts for a fair bit of time.