This article was based on the interview with Jaxon Repp, Field CTO at Harper by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
Digital agility is often associated with sweeping transformation—new platforms, new features, and reorgs aimed at unlocking growth. But for Jaxon Repp, Field CTO at Harper, the real secret lies in milliseconds. In the world of digital experience, speed isn’t just nice to have. It’s a competitive weapon.
In this conversation, Repp lays out why small delays add up to massive revenue leakage, how composability can both enable and undermine performance, and why marketing and customer experience leaders should be asking tougher questions about the infrastructure underneath their most ambitious ideas.
The Speed Layer: Where Experience Meets ROI
Repp doesn’t mince words: even the best personalization or UX work won’t matter if the site is slow.
“If you’re 100 milliseconds faster on delivering content or an A/B test, that might make millions of dollars over the course of a year,” Repp explains
Speed influences conversions, SEO rankings, and customer satisfaction. Yet many brands still deprioritize it—favoring flashy features over foundational performance. But Repp argues that performance is the feature. It’s the layer through which every interaction flows, and it should be treated with the same strategic rigor.
He points to large-scale e-commerce players like Amazon who’ve proven, again and again, that small speed improvements compound. Whether it’s a product page rendering faster or a checkout button responding immediately, each millisecond builds toward customer trust—and eventually, brand loyalty.
Composability Can’t Be a Performance Excuse
Modern digital stacks are increasingly composable—assembled from best-of-breed parts, APIs, and services. While this brings flexibility, it also introduces complexity and potential performance drag.
“A really well-structured application can give you everything you want,” says Repp. “But if your stack is seven layers away from the data, performance suffers—even if the tools are best-in-class individually”
At Harper, the team solved this by bundling the database, API layer, in-memory cache, and front-end delivery into a single platform. This ensures that functions sit directly on top of the data, reducing latency and keeping experiences responsive—even at scale.
That’s critical in a composable world, where integrations can either multiply agility or create invisible bottlenecks. Repp warns against relying on monolith-era assumptions—especially when adding client-side scripts for analytics and personalization.
“Every developer has built the perfect application—until the marketing team adds 27 tracking scripts,” he jokes
The takeaway: performance needs to be part of the conversation early. Not after the slowdown has already started.
Metrics That Matter—And Who Should Care
For many marketers and CX leaders, infrastructure performance is assumed, not interrogated. But Repp encourages them to get more specific:
- What are your target numbers for page load, time to first byte, or core web vitals?
- How many scripts are running in the browser, and are they interfering with the user experience?
- Can key performance data be captured server-side to reduce client bloat?
“If we can extract performance and user metrics from the back end, we can often eliminate a lot of the client-side baggage that slows things down,” Repp explains
This matters not just for experience—but for findability. Google’s indexing bots now reward speed with higher rankings. That means technical performance is directly tied to visibility and growth.
The Real Cost of Inaction
Repp’s clients often come to Harper after a failure. Maybe a new feature was launched that couldn’t scale. Or maybe a product team built for growth without building for resilience. The common thread? Prioritizing novelty over speed.
“If a feature slows you down, you’re worse off than when you started,” Repp says. “That’s when people come to us—when the excitement fades and the performance cracks show”
It’s a painful but predictable pattern. Brands invest in innovation without ensuring the foundation can support it. When traffic spikes, infrastructure buckles. And the result is not just tech debt—it’s lost trust, lower conversion, and diminished lifetime value.
Conclusion
Performance isn’t just a technical concern—it’s a business imperative. And Jaxon Repp makes it clear: every millisecond saved is a chance to retain a customer, earn a sale, or gain a competitive edge.
In a composable world, marketers and technologists need to collaborate more closely—aligning features with speed, personalization with scalability, and ambition with infrastructure that’s built to deliver. Because in digital experience, faster isn’t just better. It’s expected.
And if you’re not meeting that expectation? Someone else will—100 milliseconds faster.
It’s control.orld where everyone is moving faster, the real edge belongs to the ones who are also thinking deeper.
