CHAPTER 4 Culture of Performance
But this was a quality team, and one that took a lot of pride in its work.
So for the remainder of the home stretch, we all kicked it into high
gear. We worked ridiculously late nights. We worked over the weekends.
Things got stressful for everyone — there were short tempers and tears
mixed in with an absolute dedication to improving the situation.
When the site launched, it was better. Not great, but no longer quite
the monster it had been. However, it had taken a lot of incredibly hard
work to get there. Even with the improvement, we had to revisit the prima-
ry landing page of the site a few months later, ditching all the work we had
done and starting from scratch.
Just like when my family got lost in the woods before Christmas, the
long, late (and ultimately wasted) hours on this project could have been
avoided had we been more deliberate. Had performance been baked into
the process of creating the site, instead of something that gets added on,
the result would have been a faster site and a lot happier team.
The issue was not the competence of the developers. As I said, this was
an incredibly talented team. The issue was also not just technological: a lot
of smart optimizations were implemented to get the weight down. Instead,
the issue was the lack of a well-established culture of performance — a total
commitment to performance from the entire team that would drive and
influence decisions during the project cycle.
To put it more succinctly, we weren’t being deliberate about making
sure our site performed well. It was treated as something that would hap-
pen at the end. There were no strings being tied, no checking our bearings
to make sure we weren’t steering off course. As a result, when things got
hairy, performance was one of the first things to get swept under the rug.
Given the incredibly important role performance plays in the user
experience, this is a disastrous mistake to make.