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"Why should Google Maps be completely separate products for Android and iOS (and, potentially, web)?"There are multiple reasons for this, but the most important one for this discussion is pretty simple: because of the number of people required to staff it.
You need to carve team boundaries somewhere - there are inherent limits to how many people a manager can manage, and how big of a team a single tech lead can effectively run. You can't have a standup with 50 people, and there's no coherent way for a single leader to track tasks across 100 people, but that's the kind of staffing required for products of this size.
A product like Maps is expansive - it covers anything from searching for places, walking directions, real-time driving directions, data ingestion, data quality, reviews, busyness indicators, recommendations, photos, street view, transit statuses, indoor navigation, etc etc. And that's a very cursory overview of what the app does. It naturally requires a very large number of engineers to create and maintain.
So out of sheer scale you must divide the team into some kind of structure. A floating pool of hundreds of engineers is clearly not feasible. So the question is how?
There are multiple schools of thought here: dividing by frontend platform is one way. Other companies divide functionally (i.e., the street view team owns street view across all platforms), but while there are pros and cons to each of these approaches, you can't escape the same fundamental premise: you have a lot of separate teams that need to coordinate.
And how those teams communicate, coordinate, and ship together is the job of the Director and VPs.
> "I think think this focus on each product being its own entirely separate island is a big part of what's wrong with Google in general"
Agreed! But this is another reason why you need to have Directors/VPs that are actively engaged in product (and in fact whose primary duty is to product) - they are the right level of abstraction where inter-product integration is decided. They are the ones responsible for making sure these products work coherently together and do not appear (or function) as islands unto themselves.