

How Pandora Nabbed More Than 70M Monthly Users with Just 40 Engineers - nehalm
http://firstround.com/article/This-Product-Prioritization-System-Nabbed-Pandora-More-Than-70-Million-Active-Monthly-Users-with-Just-40-Engineers

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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.

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

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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...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

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doctorfoo
So, I'm doing 7 engineers worth of work. It feels about accurate.

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dilap
It's hard to compare across different types of products, but IIRC, Instagram
had only 3 engineers well into the millions of users (which I always thought
was pretty impressive).

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jasonlotito
Not just different products, but they were pretty much on one device, iOS.
Compare that to what Pandora is offered on these days.

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matt__rose
Interestingly, I worked there when there were 4 engineers. They had most of
the product worked out back then. The Pandora website the last time I checked
is not terribly functionally different from the internal Savage Beast website
from 2001. Pick a song, and it generates a playlist based on that song. The
barriers were legal and monetary, more than technical.

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philod
Were the ideas for new features and improvements all internally generated? Did
they not have some method for actual users to suggest and vote on features?

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nej
Where do you get developers for $5 per month :P

