Let's say that each product dev team is about 80 engineers. Let's double that number for support, HR, admin, etc. Let's add a team of 10 people for sales ( not needed for internal products but hey)
Now let's round it up to 200 heads.
That would make 50 large software products, is that right?
I feel like most of you all are unaware of the complexity and scope of Shopify...
The former had some stressed principal engineers, the latter was terribly inefficient and people had 1% productivity.
There is a happy medium, but nobody can manage a large headcounts without splitting in a lot of tiny products.
The core product of shopify is not something that needs 10k engineers for maintenance, even if they can afford that.
I.e. a team that is working on only Facebook Messenger back-end, a team working on Facebook Messenger Front-end, a team working on Friend Recommendation, etc.
Each of these teams is let's say 10 Dev, 2-4 QA, 1 Product Documentation, then all the normal overhead of HR, etc.