The Vercel Engineering Team aimed to improve the performance of the Vercel Dashboard, aiming for a Lighthouse score of 94 and achieving an average Vercel Analytics score of 95 on desktop. To achieve this, they identified "hot paths" in their application, which are code snippets that have the most significant impact on page load times. The team used various techniques to optimize these hot paths, including minimizing JavaScript usage, leveraging caching, optimizing imported code, and strategically lazy loading heavy components. They also discussed strategies for third-party scripts, HTML and CSS optimization, and using data to improve user experience. By implementing these techniques, the Vercel Dashboard saw significant improvements in performance, resulting in better user experiences and lifts in SEO.