Do EM's own systems? Or do they own the teams that own the systems? It's a pretty vague role. We had an EM for about a year, but when he left we didn't replace him. Nothing much changed.
Depends on the team I guess, but if I’m going to be responsible for the quality of the technical implementation then I’m definitely going to understand the implementation, and have input on the choices behind that (even if I will defer to the engineers for most of them).