The 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.

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

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...