# Speed is the killer feature - bdickason.com

<https://bdickason.com/posts/speed-is-the-killer-feature/>

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- Saved: March 4, 2021 (2021-03-04T23:11:19Z)
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## What Jamie wrote

I love the message of this article and I've seen it missed so many times. 

> Speed is a killer feature. Speed is a differentiator.
> 
> Yet teams consistently overlook speed. Instead, they add more features (which ironically make things slower). Products bloat over time and performance goes downhill.
> 
> New features might help your users accomplish something extra in your product. Latency stops your users from doing the job they already hire your product for.

When I was CTO at media companies we would look at our analytics and people would say "we have 4.2 average page views per session". But that was never really true. In reality, people gave us a certain amount of **time** and based on our performance that turned into page views. The slower and more bloated our pages, the less page views we would enable.

The other thing is that this is often not about the tech, but is specifically about bloating the service. When I was at MarketWatch our CEO used to ask me frequently why one of our pages was slower than Yahoo! Finances page that did the same thing. I told him Yahoo!'s page had 1/10th of the images, styling, Javascript, ads, etc. Finally we actually built a clone of Yahoo!'s page on our platform. It looked and did the same things, and was blazing fast.

Performance is an enabler to so many good things.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT176: Weekly Thing #176 / Brave Search, Speed, Finger.Farm](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/176/), Must Read

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://bdickason.com/posts/speed-is-the-killer-feature/