Product Managers and Division Managers and Staff Engineers and Research Scientists do, and there are thousands of each of these at Google.

Maybe the problem is deeper and stem from culture and hiring practices that privilege academia, instead of real world industry and engineering experience?

Your diatribe makes little sense. A healthy company has Product Managers in charge of each product, and in complex products its customary to break them off further into feature sets and even markets, each managed exclusively by a Product Manager.

Staff engineers are the result of having a hierarchical org where you need highly specialized and experienced people to take the lead of technical projects. What problem do you exactly see in this?

Researchers focus in research. What problem do you see in this, exactly?

It sounds like you are desperately trying to find something to complain about in spite of not having any grasp on the subject you're discussing.

The results speak for itself. I offered my diagnostic. Why don't you indulge us with yours?

And who built Google as it is? Both founders were from academia.

This can be spin in any way somebody wants, but after 20 years, no budget limits, no lack of expertise inhouse, and no lack of time for experiments, the malaise is clear. It hints at fundamental cultural and organizational issues, that wont be solved either with layoffs or new management.

Until that is addressed, Google future trend is to become another IBM, only this time with others eating away their lunch much faster.