I asked Akamai for a demo.
They had a new product that claimed it could speed up an entire website, not only the static images. That sounded useful. It also sounded like the kind of claim that needed to be tested against our actual traffic.
Shutterstock was an ecommerce site built around images. Page speed sat directly between a customer and the thing they wanted to buy. A slow search result, preview, or checkout was not an abstract infrastructure problem. It was a worse product.
The usual content-delivery setup already handled static files well. The interesting question was whether Akamai could make the dynamic parts faster too.
I did not know if it would be compatible with the way our site worked. I said that plainly. We would get the demo running, measure the result, and then know whether it was worth pursuing.
That was the whole update.
There is a version of technical leadership that turns every vendor test into a strategy presentation. This was not that. A product made a claim. We had a real site and enough traffic to test it. The next step was to put the two together.
Site performance work was full of these experiments. Some changes produced an obvious gain. Some moved one part of the page while slowing another. Some worked in a clean demonstration and became much less impressive under production conditions.
The useful discipline was to stay interested without getting sold.
If the demo made the site meaningfully faster, great. If it did not, we would have an answer and move on.
The customer did not care which vendor was in the path or how clever the setup looked.
The page either arrived faster or it did not.