Innovation on Large Projects

I read this article today on The Seed of Apple's Innovation and I was very interested. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and it's something that's just been in my head. As an engineer, I have this creative pulse and I can get really connected to the products that I'm working on. If you're on a large project, you can often become disconnected from the customer. I can sometimes get stuck thinking like 'just another cog' to churn out code. Management teams definitely don't want their employees to think this way, but maybe it's a symptom of the team structure, and not some grand scheme to use people. One of the points of the article was that Apple organizes teams around a product. Companies struggling around how to organize teams know it's not an easy thing for management to grasp this important piece. A company may want to keep common as much code as possible, and keep people in areas of their expertise. I think this tends to organize people around the code, and not around the product which can be a much larger entity. The smaller and closer knit team will always be more effective, and it is a challenge to break up very large projects so that smaller teams can work on them. I would really like to see exactly how this works in the more successful companies.