Recently I had a client that came to me and wanted to decrease the latency on page loads for their entire platform. My question was which pages specifically are going to have the biggest impact on your bottom line? Initially they said all of them but I pushed back knowing that we were going to have a Pareto law situation where roughly 80% of the results would come from focusing on fixing the top 20% most important pages.

They were an ecommerce platform so for SEO sake the product listing pages needed to be lightning fast or they would get knocked down in the search engine rankings. Additionally the slower the product pages loaded the fewer potential products customers could browse and therefore their conversion rate would suffer.

Their platform had thousands of pages with tens of thousands of files in the codebase but after doing some careful digging we were able to figure out just a handful of offenders that, if fixed, would have a drastic impact on the entire site.

We might make it to those other pages someday, we might not. The important thing was that we were focused on the pages that were going to have a ten million dollar a year impact on the site long before the pages that might only have a ten thousand dollar a year impact.

The moral of the story: Us engineers like to focus on cool engineering stuff sometimes, but it is important that every technical person can also put their business hat on and focus on the raw dollars and cents. Any big initiative should have an ROI behind it that can be quantified.

To help with this I recommend the book “The Goal” by Dr. Eli Goldratt