I am Paul, on the left there.

I work on Google's Developer Relations team

where I spend my time looking at performance, design, and UX

and normally where the three of those meet.

LARA: And I am Lara Swanson.

I work at Etsy and I'm the Engineering Manager

for the Performance team.

We help all of the feature teams who

are building products or features or experiments,

make sure that whatever they're shipping

is as fast as humanly possible.

PAUL: Alright so, I guess the opening question is, why are we

even talking about performance cultures?

Why does this session even exist?

And I think to answer that we need

to understand a little bit about where our industry is

and what we are seeing and where we think it's going to go.

And it's really about this.

The multi-device web.

We've seen more devices than ever before come online

and I think really the one that stands out

for me the most is this one.

It's the smartphone.

It represents the most performance constrained device

that we have.

Whether that is in terms of the screen size,

or the GPU, the CPU, or its connection to the network.

And the thing is more and more people are using smartphones.

In fact, one study suggests that just over a third

of American adults use their smartphone

as the primary means of accessing the internet.

Which means for those people their first experience

of you, your site, your brand is going

to be through their smartphone.

And that is something that we need to be thinking through.

In fact, it's not just in the States it's also globally.

So, here we have the percentage of total global internet

traffic according to Stat Counter

and you can see that the trend is pretty clear upwards.

And it looks I think sort of the middle of next year,

if the trend line is correct, that well

cross that 50% marker.

So the thing about this is--

LARA: Mobile networks can add a tremendous amount of latency.

So, before a mobile device can transmit or receive data

it has to establish a radio channel with the network.

And this can take several seconds over a 3G connection.

After the device talks to a radio tower

to negotiate when it can transmit data,

the network carrier then must transmit that data

to its internal network, and then to the public internet.

So, the combination of these steps

can add up to tens of thousands of milliseconds

of extra latency.

So, the most important question I

hear when I say this is, well what about 4G?

4G is awesome right?

Our networks are improving.

But you have to remember the new device and fast network

with an excellent connection that you have in your pocket

right now is not a good representation of what your end

users are really experiencing.

So, while it's true that networks are getting better

you need to remember that your users are

on a variety of connections, with various levels

of connectivity, and latency.

It's also important to remember that if you're a site is slow

people will go elsewhere.

In fact, one study suggests that as many as 40% of people

will leave a site when it takes longer than three seconds

to load.

So, we have some options.

In the face of the stuff that's a little bit

scary what can we do about it?

The first option is to ignore it.

You can certainly say, you know what we just

saw those awesome stats.

We say that we're actually-- we're trying,

but we don't think it's that important.

Maybe mobile isn't the future, maybe that trend line is going

to lie to us, maybe networks will be better immediately,

I don't think that this is true.

PAUL: No, I tend to think-- no.

LARA: I think that we can't just ignore it.

PAUL: I'd like to.

LARA: Yeah, it'd be really cool, but I

think the other option is to assign performance cops.

Right?

Who in here would identified as a performance cop or janitor

within their organization?

PAUL: Anybody ever been one of those?

LARA: Yeah, somebody who comes in afterwards cleans up.

PAUL: Look at these hands.

Look at this. [DEEP VOICE] Yes that's me, I don't know.

LARA: So, performance cops, right?

We come in and we say, hey designer, hey developer here's

some better ways you can do this.

You come in cleaning up after people,

you try to make your site better,

but the responsibility solely rests on you.

And this can often lead to a tremendous amount of burnout

and frankly, it's not sustainable.

There's always going to be new people joining

your organization, your site will continue to get slower,

it'll continue to be iterated upon,

the hardware age, being a performance cop

is not a sustainable thing, so that's

why we're here to talk about building performance cultures.

PAUL: Wow, I wonder which one we'll choose from that list?

[LAUGH]

PAUL: So, we're all set to build a performance culture, super.

But we have to ask the question what

do we even mean by a culture.

Well I guess you could come up with your own definitions

goodness knows there's probably a bunch of them

that you could think up, but for us today,

at least in this conversation, here's the things

that we actually have in mind.

Firstly, it's a way of saying, I belong to this group,

I get them, hopefully they get me,

I understand this particular group.

So, for example being British, I would

identify with British culture.

LARA: You're British?

I know right it's a relief for anybody in the room going,

where is he from?

His American accent is really strange.

LARA: [LAUGH]

Yeah, I know.

So, it's that first and foremost is just saying,

yep this is my kind of people.

It's also about how you think and how

you reason and rationalize the world around you

and the kind of social cues that you

look for or the slightly strange obsession with green liquids

you may or may not have, but it's

that sense of the world around you.

It's also how you do things.

Whether that's the side of the road

you drive on maybe the wrong side, the words

that you use for things or perhaps

in our case how we go about crafting the code.

And then lastly, it's how you celebrate things,

the things that are important to you,

the things that you celebrate and how

you go about celebrating it is unique to your culture.

And we see cultures at the highest level

internationally, nationally, all the way down to our homes

and so forth, and actually of course, our workplaces,

which brings us back to that whole performance culture

thing.

LARA: Yeah, we were joking when we

were talking about earlier that performance cultures are

kind of a team sport.

It's important to remember that everybody has to play.

And as you say about sports there is no "I" in performance.

PAUL: That is true, but if you're willing to look hard

enough you'll find there is "prance-for-me".

You can stop the slide now.

LARA: Alright, alright.

So, thank you for that.

So, culture change is scary and it's hard

and I can understand especially for those of us in this room,

we don't know necessarily how to approach it.

How do we start to create or enact performance culture

within our environments?

I'm going to go through some real things that

have been said to me as I've gone

on this journey within the organizations I've worked in.

Lara, "I don't want to think about mobile."

Right.

PAUL: So