A long time coming...

I’ve joined SpeedCurve! I’m thrilled to share this news and have never been more excited about a career change than I am today. I’ve known this cast of characters for a while and am humbled that they have brought me onto the team. As Tammy put it when she joined, if this crew invited you to work with them, “what would you say?” 

Tammy, Steve and Cliff at Velocity Conference circa 2015

Who am I?

As a veteran in the performance industry, I’ve spent a large part of my career helping to build performance culture. I’ve been in countless rooms and discussions defending the case for performance and helping to educate cross-functional teams about the impact of performance on the user experience and ultimately the health of the business. 

My journey has taken me to both sides – as a product leader focused on building tools and solutions for customers, and as a practitioner focused on creating a culture of performance for one the world’s largest brands.

What am I most excited about?

As Chief Product Officer for SpeedCurve, I’m thrilled to continue this journey. I’ve been a longtime fan of the product and can’t wait to start contributing to its growth and adding more value for our customers!

Here are some of the areas you’ll see me getting most excited about:

RUM + Synthetic

I LOVE how the team has focused on showing real user data (LUX) with synthetic (WebPageTest). Mark and I started exploring this years ago, and I feel like we're just now scratching the surface of what’s possible. I’ll be looking at ways we can continue to combine and compare these datasets for new insights while continuing to educate practitioners on how best to leverage the unique perspective each technology brings.

Building a more inclusive web

Traditionally, we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on entitled groups as it relates to performance – fast connection speeds, devices with high-end CPUs, low-latency geographies. While it’s important to understand the characteristics of these users, I would argue that the more important segment to focus on exists in the longtail. I’ve been inspired by Tim Kadlec’s talk on this and am thrilled to start looking at ways to highlight this in our products.

Building performance culture across the organization

While you may say to yourself “nothing new here”, every day I see more and more opportunity to bring performance into the mainstream. Whether we adopt performance as a principle in our design systems, set and maintain performance budgets for product owners, integrate performance tests into our build systems, or simply create a conversation with non-technical users around perceived performance, there is always more to do in our organizations. Making performance data consumable by the masses is perhaps the thing I love most about SpeedCurve, and the thing I’m most excited to be contributing to and talking to you about...

...with one exception...

I’m most excited about keeping the focus on you!

Building products and features “outside-in” is my top priority and guiding principle. SpeedCurve is known for this today and I plan to do even more on behalf of you as we prioritize and build our roadmap. Understanding your pain, your users’ pain, and shaping products and solutions to make your job easier is what I care about most.

What can you expect from me?

While I’m diving into product, vision, and strategy, I’ll also be working closely with Tammy in her outreach to customers and prospective users to get insight as we build out our roadmap for SpeedCurve over the next year. 

Keep an eye out for me on Twitter, and at events and meetups in your area. If you’d like to chat about the direction of SpeedCurve's products – or if you’d just like to catch up and learn more about us – I’d love to hear from you!