How Pandora Nabbed More Than 70M Monthly Users with Just 40 Engineers

40 engineers is a &quot;skeleton crew&quot;? 40 engineers? There are tons of websites&#x2F;products out there doing a lot more with a lot less.<p>And I love pandora, but this product management technique isn&#x27;t exactly revolutionary. It is just a pretty standard top down system, albeit only planning one quarter at a time. This isn&#x27;t pushing the boundaries like Valve or Yammer.

So, I&#x27;m doing 7 engineers worth of work. It feels about accurate.

It&#x27;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?

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