The thing is, it’s possible to train a surprising amount of people to spew out good ideas. The only real requirement is that they possess a base level of curiosity.
Anyway, something that you start to realize as time goes on is that despite prodigious velocity 90-95% of good product ideas come from the same damn people. It was like the same 6-7 people in the first few years of the company. 10 years later, it was the 5 of them that were left, plus another half-full dozen that we'd picked up over the years. That was it. Almost everything else was either an obvious customer ask, a straightforward change, or direction from one of the product luminaries. Almost all of the large conceptual shifts came from the same people despite literally 100x the resources, or more. Coding was absolutely a bottleneck to making things happen but major product innovation was a significant bottleneck on the exponential of the business. And fwiw these few people are basically non-stop factories for good ideas.