[birken]

40 engineers is a "skeleton crew"? 40 engineers? There are tons of websites/products out there doing a lot more with a lot less.

And I love pandora, but this product management technique isn't exactly revolutionary. It is just a pretty standard top down system, albeit only planning one quarter at a time. This isn't pushing the boundaries like Valve or Yammer.

[Aloisius]

The number of users isn't actually what makes it impressive. At Napster, we had 80 million users at a time where we had 1 backend engineer, 3 web developers, 3 windows developers and 3 mac developers.

But 40 engineers to build apps for web, iOS, android, blackberry, windows phone, a thousand consumer devices, 100 types of cars, etc. is impressive assuming they roll out new features regularly. Even if some of it was done third-party, just the managing new integrations, ensuring feature releases are backwards compatible and testing new releases is still a feat.

I agree the project management style isn't anything special though. Plenty of people use something like scrum with dollar values attached to features.

[badusername]

Care to explain more about the Valve or Yammer references? (Genuinely curious).

[owyn]

Don't know about Yammer, but Valve has a very flat structure where engineers work directly on projects that they are interested in (and presumably that they think will bring in revenue). Quote from their (definitely must-read) employee handbook:

"We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100."

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...