[milesvp]

I was lucky at one point to work with product owners who understood that latency translated to lost revenue and so they helped champion the idea that engineering excellence was actually valuable, and that squeezing out performance was itself a worthy goal. It helped that we could compare our metrics to comparable sites, and could give upper management bragging rights when our pages loaded faster than bigger higher staffed “competitors”.

But otherwise, I think you tend to be right, in a lot of areas even an extra second of latency doesn’t matter, and more features will move the needle more.