Performance Vitals: a unified scoring system to guide performance health and prioritization
Article Summary
Coinbase scaled from a handful of engineers on one platform to four platforms with zero standardized performance measurement. How do you unify performance tracking across web, mobile, backend, and extensions?
Coinbase's engineering team created Performance Vitals, a company-wide scoring system that extends Google's Core Web Vitals across their entire stack. They built custom metrics for React Native and backend services, giving every team a common language for performance.
Key Takeaways
- Uses 85th percentile threshold (stricter than Google's 75th) for catching regressions early
- Created Navigation Total Blocking Time (NTBT) to measure UI responsiveness during page transitions
- Backend services must respond under 300ms, GraphQL under 500ms for 'good' scores
- Real-time anomaly detection alerts teams immediately when performance drops
- Open sourcing React Native Core Vitals library in coming quarters
Critical Insight
A unified scoring system (0-100) across frontend and backend lets teams set shared KRs and speak the same performance language from sprint planning to incident response.
