3 ms·

> Performance is very very rarely a contributor to a product success You might as well say, having users is very very rarely a contributor to a product success

> Performance is very very rarely a contributor to a product success You might as well say, having users is very very rarely a contributor to a product success. We're over two+ decades into the 21st Century and we're still pushing a 20th Century mindset? Why Lord? Why?

SgtBastard 4y ago
> You might as well say, having users is very very rarely a contributor to success. These two things are not even remotely the same thing. Having users is a path to monetisation but having a high performant app no one uses is not. In fact, if you have users despite performance, it suggests you have a home run product that can be optimised for performance. Again, you can’t optimise your way to user growth.
- _heimdall 4y ago
  > Having users is a path to monetisation but having a high performant app no one uses is not. These two things are also not the same. You start with "having users" and assume they're willing to pay and will stick around. You compare that to "having a high performance app no one uses" - explicitly limiting the scenario with an unrelated caveat that no one uses it. A better comparison would look only at having users vs. a high performance app, which has too little information, or having users that aren't willing to pay vs. a high performance app that no one uses, which leave you in the same boat.
  - SgtBastard 4y ago
    Friend, your nitpicks here are of something I didn’t say. I said explicitly “path to monetisation” not “assume they’ll pay and stick around”. I hope you’ll agree that it’s easier to find a subset of users that will pay when your superset of all users is large vs a super(?)set of zero.
Illniyar 4y ago
I might not as well say that. I in fact said something completely opposite - that users don't care about performance. Hence more features->more users.
- holbrad 4y ago
  That's just simply not true though... Do users explicitly care about how many milliseconds somethings takes? No definitely not Do they care if the application feels slow ? Yes absolutely Do faster experiences subconsciously feel better ? Yes Does that subconscious feeling, impact metrics like sales or conversion ? Yes it does
  - kunley 4y ago
    All the (dozens and hundreds) milliseconds add up and the sum of it is perceived easily
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  People pretty regularly say they buy iPhones because of the very smooth UI (performance), that they buy an ARM Mac because it's so much faster, etc. Google won partly because it was so fast. So people do explicitly justify usage decisions with performance, all the time. Agreed that overall features win out but it's often the case that multiple products end up with broadly comparable sets of features and struggle to gain a persistent advantage there. Once you reach that point, perf can be a competitive advantage.

SgtBastard 4y ago

> You might as well say, having users is very very rarely a contributor to success. These two things are not even remotely the same thing. Having users is a path to monetisation but having a high performant app no one uses is not. In fact, if you have users despite performance, it suggests you have a home run product that can be optimised for performance. Again, you can’t optimise your way to user growth.

_heimdall 4y ago
> Having users is a path to monetisation but having a high performant app no one uses is not. These two things are also not the same. You start with "having users" and assume they're willing to pay and will stick around. You compare that to "having a high performance app no one uses" - explicitly limiting the scenario with an unrelated caveat that no one uses it. A better comparison would look only at having users vs. a high performance app, which has too little information, or having users that aren't willing to pay vs. a high performance app that no one uses, which leave you in the same boat.
- SgtBastard 4y ago
  Friend, your nitpicks here are of something I didn’t say. I said explicitly “path to monetisation” not “assume they’ll pay and stick around”. I hope you’ll agree that it’s easier to find a subset of users that will pay when your superset of all users is large vs a super(?)set of zero.

Illniyar 4y ago

I might not as well say that. I in fact said something completely opposite - that users don't care about performance. Hence more features->more users.

holbrad 4y ago
That's just simply not true though... Do users explicitly care about how many milliseconds somethings takes? No definitely not Do they care if the application feels slow ? Yes absolutely Do faster experiences subconsciously feel better ? Yes Does that subconscious feeling, impact metrics like sales or conversion ? Yes it does
- kunley 4y ago
  All the (dozens and hundreds) milliseconds add up and the sum of it is perceived easily
fidgewidge 4y ago
People pretty regularly say they buy iPhones because of the very smooth UI (performance), that they buy an ARM Mac because it's so much faster, etc. Google won partly because it was so fast. So people do explicitly justify usage decisions with performance, all the time. Agreed that overall features win out but it's often the case that multiple products end up with broadly comparable sets of features and struggle to gain a persistent advantage there. Once you reach that point, perf can be a competitive advantage.