Designing for Performance

Chapter 8. Changing Culture at Your Organization

The largest hurdle to creating and maintaining stellar site performance is the culture of your organization. No matter the size or type of team, it can be a challenge to educate, incentivize, and empower those around you. Performance more often comes down to a cultural challenge, rather than simply a technical one.

It is rare to have a culture of performance in which everyone at an organization values the impact that performance has on the user experience. Often, there are performance cops or janitors at a company who take it upon themselves to improve site speed. Sometimes, companies will dedicate infrastructure team resources toward performance improvements. There should absolutely be performance champions at your organization (in fact, you’re probably one of them!). However, limiting the responsibility of performance to a small group of people will make it nearly impossible to keep the site’s speed under control, particularly as the site ages, changes, and is worked on by new people.

It’s important to recognize when a problem needs technical solutions, when it needs cultural solutions, and when it needs both. Many of the chapters in this book cover technical solutions for performance, but the cultural solutions covered here will help you leverage these technical solutions’ impact and make sure it lasts.

Performance Cops and Janitors

Performance improvements often begin as one person’s voice within a company culture. You start to notice ...