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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
by birken 13y ago
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 13y agoThe 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 13y agoCare to explain more about the Valve or Yammer references? (Genuinely curious).
- owyn 13y agoDon'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.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...