10000 employees with let's say 40% overhead translates into 2000 3-ish lean teams. Certainly some would be far larger than 3 person but even then. Is Spotify surface that huge really?
Maybe? At Spotify’s scale, those teams would include things like “GCP-friendly audio encoding optimization” or “playlist sharing scalability”. I don’t know enough to estimate what a reasonable size should be (if such an estimation is even possible), but running software for hundreds of millions of users is hard.
Honestly (for someone also working with audio) these team descriptions sound like they would idle most of the time.
My usual yardstick is Apollo programme development team size: about 600 developers. Relatively few tasks are substantially more challenging than writing code that would get people to the Moon and back. There have to be some that are as hard or harder naturally. But when you see a commercial company that has an order of magnitude or two more devs than that, using modern tooling and conveniences, it's hard to fathom.
Not all of the employees are working on the tech side. I can only imagine Spotify has a ton of business operations, sales, legal, etc. It's a worldwide company, too.
And when it comes to product development teams, 3 is pretty minimal. I'm sure most teams have more people than that. I'm simply pointing out that there are a lot of corners of functionality within the platform and one way you can press the gas pedal to accelerate your roadmap is fragmenting areas of concern and forming teams around those fragments. If the conditions for making those bets change, you undo that by consolidating teams, lengthening roadmaps, and downsizing staff (in some order).
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