Tagged: culture

Drawing upon each model, I tried to roughly gauge the perf maturity of organizations, but found I needed a more visual aid — a map of perf work that I would help me identify where orgs are in their perf journey: what areas of performance there are and what level they are in those areas. So I drew up a “Performance Maturity Matrix” with four levels including a “null” level (i.e. lacking the traits of performance maturity) and nine areas of perf work.

Lovely performance "postmortem" from Eli Fitch about how MapBox got their first-meaningful-paint to drop from 4.7s to 1.9 seconds.

Some good insights into technical optimizations, but as always, the cultural aspects are the most difficult–and the most important.

Nurturing cultural awareness and enthusiasm for building fast, snappy, responsive, tactile products is arguably the most effective performance improvement you can make, but can be the most challenging, and requires the most ongoing attention.

Cennydd expands on something he discussed in his (excellent) book, Future Ethics: why hiring a chief ethics officer may not be a particularly effective approach.

A chief ethics officer would be too distanced from product and design orgs, where most ethical decisions are made; their duties would come into conflict with those of the CFO, who is already on the hook for financial ethics; and the seniority of the role would mean this person would be seen as an ethical arbiter, an oracle who passes ethical judgment. This is IMO a failure state for ethics. Loading ethical responsibility onto a sole enlightened exec doesn’t scale, and it reduces the chance of genuine ethical discourse within companies by individualising the problem.

I really enjoyed this post from Dropbox about what they do to help cultivate an internal culture of accessibility.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the advice here mirrors the same sort of good advice an organization might here about cultivating cultures of performance, security or any other critical yet overlooked component of design and development: share knowledge, experience the issues first-hand, celebrate improvements, and build it directly into your workflow.

Even in my tiny design practice, every decision I make is shaped by my biases; every decision I make is capable of harm. And it’s so, so easy to forget this: to focus on the layout challenge in front of me, to fulfil the client’s latest request, or to meet a business goal. When I do these things, I occasionally forget to ask myself who’ll be impacted by my work and, most importantly, to ask how I can mitigate that harm.