Shipping faster is really just another form of cheaper. It isn't a linear relationship (the whole 9 women working for 1 month thing), but there is no question that dedicating more resources to a problem can help fix it quicker, especially with the frequency that companies are acquired in tech.

I am not sure that Facebook creating Instagram Stories to compete with Snapchat is a definitively better solution than Twitter buying Periscope to compete with Meerkat. Either way, you still need someone to think up those new features, communicate them to the public, and sell them to your customers.

I think that's the point he's trying to make this.

But who communicates this to the customer? How decides what features are built (in a larger company)? Who pitches these new features to potential customers?

At a big enough company where the engineers aren't the ones doing this work, the benefits of any engineering achievement is moot if those other 3 groups don't do their jobs well.