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