[napoleoncomplex]

Have to add a different perspective here (the management one), just to try to give a potential explanation. I did pretty much the same thing to my team, though with a lot more background as to why. We were severely rocked by a Google search ranking update, and basically lost 70% of traffic overnight. We had no idea why, none of our metrics over the past years changed, but it all went to shit. In the days after, we set out a plan to try to recover this ranking, even though we had no idea what we need to do. Page speed was one of those metrics we set out to improve, and even though it wasn't bad, but it wasn't exceptional. As with other SEO stuff, there was no guarantee this will help, but we needed to try, along with a few other things. After we fixed it (along with a few other things), there was very small growth initially, and it took another 9 months for our SEO to fully recover, but we did fully recover. Was it Page speed? Who knows, but 30 million website visits were earned back one way or another.

I can easily see from an employee's perspective, they could react like you, "why the hell am I doing page speed shit, we're already fine, this is bullshit". Especially because the entire field of SEO sounds like total random guesswork to a lot of engineers. But I expect the team to have the common sense not to completely fuck up the product in the mean time and/or fake results, even if the metric we're measuring and improving is page speed. I don't think that's an OKR issue, that's just not giving a shit issue that no management approach can solve (on both sides, since the management spent no time explaining why page speed is important to improve).