One aspect of a software product which every company that develops software struggles with, all with very little outside guidance and standards for support, is product performance. A user’s impression of how fast your product moves from screen to screen, how quickly it calls up lists of records, how seamlessly it performs tasks when you click a button, all this forms one of the cornerstones of opinion about the quality of your product.

Perhaps even more than other aspects of their job, Product Managers must wrestle with how to approach product performance on their own, with few standards in a world of quickly changing technology. As they work with Customer Service to determine the severity of the impact on customer satisfaction, and with Development to determine what can realistically be done, they have scarce objective advice to go on.

Read on for some advice, based on 17 years of experience working with software, on how to approach the performance tuning of your software product so that you build a reputation for quality and satisfied customers.