I understand it to mean that there is a part of the org (separate from the engineering team) that shapes the direction of the product; decides "these are the features we're going to implement, these are the issues we're going to address"; one way of looking at it is that their primary output is putting things in to the engineering team's backlog.

Yeah, this is what I was talking about. Software product management as a separate functional org from engineering.

Not like old-Dupont-style product orgs.

Aha - so you are saying there is a product manager (plus "org") whose job it is to produce big backlogs separate from the people who will implement them.

yeah that's never gonna work :-(