The CircleCI Insights team undertook a significant optimization project to improve their pipeline configuration for the Insights UI, which had been causing delays in end-to-end testing and deployments with a P95 runtime of 25 minutes. By strategically rewriting their pipeline over two days, they achieved a 50% reduction in build times, reducing the P95 runtime to 12 minutes. The team emphasized the importance of understanding workflows and implementing practices such as writing atomic jobs, optimizing data flow with caching and workspaces, and using tools like Insights to identify optimization targets. They also highlighted the benefits of focusing on small, validated changes rather than large rewrites, which included skipping unnecessary processes, refactoring tasks, and parallelizing tests. This approach resulted in improved efficiency, enabling more frequent and faster deployments while maintaining the quality and security of their builds.