Performance engineering and load testing are crucial for modern software organizations to ensure their applications can handle increasing workloads and meet performance expectations. The process typically involves setting a baseline capacity, identifying bottlenecks, isolating the root cause, and then tuning to alleviate the issue. A systematic approach using tools like New Relic provides in-depth monitoring and insights into application performance, including browser response times, user sessions, application speed, and utilization of backend resources. By following a 12-step process outlined in this blog post, teams can methodically load test and analyze their applications to identify and address performance bottlenecks, ultimately improving the scalability and reliability of their software applications.