Slack's Unified Cross-Platform Performance Metrics
Original post Unified Cross-Platform Performance Metrics
Article Summary
Liang Shi from Slack reveals how fragmented performance metrics were creating a maze for engineers. Different names, different definitions, same problem: nobody could tell if the app was actually getting faster.
Slack's engineering team faced a critical problem: Desktop, iOS, and Android each tracked performance differently, making cross-platform comparisons impossible. They unified their metrics using a shared Thrift specification, focusing on two key measurements that matter to users across all platforms.
Key Takeaways
- Time to Visible (TTV) measures when cached content appears on screen
- Time to Usable (TTU) tracks when the latest server content is displayed
- 90% of mobile sessions have no new content to sync after launch
- Special cases like no cache, user intervention, and upgrades are explicitly tagged
- Single data pipeline enables side by side performance comparison across platforms
Unified metrics with common definitions across platforms enabled Slack to set shared performance goals, simplify analytics, and consistently meet user expectations regardless of device.
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This page summarizes “Unified Cross-Platform Performance Metrics” by Slack, published Jul 31, 2018. All credit for the original work goes to the authors.
