The performance budget conversation
Writing team:
Tomas Nyberg Engineering leadHave it at kickoff, in writing, with numbers. Everything after that is arithmetic.
Budgets fail when they arrive last
A performance budget introduced after the design is finished is not a budget, it is a complaint. By then the weight is in decisions nobody wants to reopen: the font stack, the hero video, the third analytics script.
Spend it like money
The useful version of the conversation is an allocation, agreed before the work starts, that everyone can spend against.
- A number per route, not per site: a landing page and a dashboard have different jobs.
- An owner per line: fonts, images, scripts, third parties.
- A rule for going over: what gets cut, decided in advance.
Third parties are the whole argument
In most audits we run, first-party code is not the problem. The problem is four tags nobody can name the owner of, two of which load each other.
Make it visible in the pull request
A budget nobody sees is a budget nobody keeps. The check belongs in CI, failing loudly, with the diff attached — not in a quarterly report.
Ship the next release with a team that has done this before
We join in-flight products and leave them faster to change than we found them. Research, design and front-end, on one clock.
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