Interesting ideas. I wonder how much of this translates to product development. From the perspective of the person assembling the product the work is all additive.
Fitting the product to meet customer requirements is more of a subtractive effort. Like popping items off a list.
My experience in NPD (New Product Development) is that this article applies pretty much exactly as written, since the NPD part of a NPD project is more or less 100% subtractive.
Additive work really has a certain 19th- or 20th-century feel to it. It often involves a clock ("my job is to be the receptionist for these 8 hours") or basket ("my job today is done when I've filled/emptied this basket of TPS reports"). The car assembly example from the article is of this type: the job is to fill the (not actually physical) basket with as many cars as possible, in a shift.
