I have seen the same basic cycle, management says don't focus on perf, just "knock out" (I despise this lingo) the features. They have this overconfidence, but flop on the next release and patronize the dev team about perf.
1) tracked from the beginning so it is drained from the system merge by merge
2) architected in at the design level and not applied as a spell.
I really like what the rust team is doing with tracking rustc compilation times. Another reason that integration tests are the best tests.