Who is defining and managing the PRDs and the roadmap in this scenario? What about user testing and customer development? By “graphic design”, do you mean User Interface design? If so, who is responsible for the user experience beyond just UI?

The point I’m trying to make is that it takes some effort (beyond just the plumbing) to create an experience that folks actually want to use on an ongoing basis

> Who is defining and managing the PRDs and the roadmap in this scenario?

Mainly the project manager.

> What about user testing and customer development?

Testing could be done by everyone, mainly the project manager, although you could perhaps add a tester to the team. Don't know what customer development is.

> By “graphic design”, do you mean User Interface design? If so, who is responsible for the user experience beyond just UI?

Yes, UI design. The graphic designer would be primarily responsible for UX, but also the project manager and developers.

This is based on my experience with mobile app development. Right now, it's a fairly complex product, users often say that it's much better for many use cases than the alternative by Google, which I guess may be developed by a 10x larger team.

We are not talking future development, just maintaining status quo.

Rode map is just: keep it working, or whatever EM twitted about hour ago :)

But I agree it's way to optimistic number. You need at least a few for each platform, just because of bus factor, you also need people to keep in touch with Apple/Google reps etc., making sure bills are paid etc.

I imagine it will mostly be just minor tweaks and no major features, you can easily do both mobile targets by cca 10 people, not working crazy hours. There are plenty of successful apps with smaller teams, that make it work.

>There are plenty of successful apps

Eh, tossing the direct comparison to Twitter out here because they seem to have gone too far the other way, this is much like saying "I can make 1,000,000 screws a day, so assembling at least 100 cars a day should be easy".

The hard part of twitter is on server side.

I am not saying that writing twitter like app is easy, but writing it and keeping it running are two different things.

If you are not adding new features, you are just mostly keeping up with Android/Apple platforms, which can be annoying, but not that difficult.

I'm maintaining status quo for an Android/iOS app and it takes perhaps 5% of my work hours.

> also need people to keep in touch with Apple/Google reps etc.

You certainly don't need people specifically for this task.

Not sure if you’re joking or not, but that’s exactly how Telegram stems to work. One person per app (ok, for the desktop app it’s three people now).

I'm all about lean teams, but this is a joke.

Well that's what I did, I made both iOS and Android version of an app and some of the design.

I mean, a mediocre complexity app doesn't need more than one developer for a "slow improvement mode".

But Twitter needs more than 5 employees.

How many bug reports do you think the Twitter site and apps get each day? How many employees do you think it takes just to triage them?

You don't have to read all of the bug reports, just a representative sample to discover issues worth fixing.

How do you get a 'representative' sample?

You still have to read them to work out that user X saying they can't log in is the same as user Y saying authentication is failing at A stage, issue is present on B and C platforms version D.E

Further the issue of 'site using the wrong font' is not equally as important as 'site is exposing private user data'. And you're likely to get many people reporting the former, and maybe only one reporting the latter, so a sample isn't likely to catch the really important stuff.

You're joking, right?

I'm serious. Why would you need more than one developer for the Android or iOS app?

She or he is just naive. It does not take much distinction to post on HN.

How many people would you say it would need for the backend?