Well, the time has come, my contract with Estee Lauder is soon ending… :-(
It has been a really great 3+ years…
Starting off as part of the Web Performance and Optimization team, I was astonished to find what an amazing performance culture the great Alla Gringaus had created! I was suddenly in chats with high-level execs that knew what LCP and CLS meant, and actually seemed to care about them!
As with any new job, and as this was my first job dedicated to web performance, I had a lot of new terms, acronyms and tools to learn, but learn them I did! And with 400+ sites worldwide, covering 20+ brands in 100+ countries, it was no easy task! But soon I was conducting site performance audits; filing Jira tickets; suggesting code improvements; discussing the pros, cons and differences of Lighthouse, CrUX, PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, Synthetic and RUM; educating on the best practices of lazy loading media, preloading fonts and LCP assets, and reducing JS where possible; and much, much more. It was a heady time!
Over the next few years, and a few rounds of lay-offs, I soon found myself on a performance team of one, covering all performance concerns for all brands, worldwide… It was daunting, and at times overwhelming, but my focus always remained on “what will give the user the best experience”. I had now also moved beyond simply suggesting code improvements, to pulling the repo, creating branches, coding and testing improvements on my personal server, submitting those changes for code review, and deploying to production; what a change!
During my time with Estee, I was able to assist with some incredible CWV improvements:
- LCP reduced globally from an average of 3.26s to 1.78s, and in key markets (CA, UK, US) from an average of 2.94s to 1.81s, and
- CLS reduced globally from an average of 0.41 to nearly 0.10, and in key markets (CA, UK, US) from an average of 0.44s to nearly 0.00!
But most importantly, I had the distinct pleasure of working with some absolutely terrific people on some very challenging projects! Strewn around the globe, from Romania to Spain, London, New York, Philadelphia, Nashville, Canada, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, China, India and beyond, they are some of the best people I have ever met. Beyond their skill sets, they are just great humans, and I will miss them dearly…
But for now, I have to look forward, taking everything I have learned to whatever the next phase of life brings.
And so, if anyone out there happens to know of a clunky website that could use some web performance love, give me a holler! ;-)
Happy surfing,
Atg