Every metric needs a goal. A number without a target is just data.

A number without a target is just data

Every metric on our scorecard had a goal. Not most of them — all of them. I can't think of a case where a number belongs on a leadership scorecard with no target and no context, just sitting there to be observed. If you can't say what it should be, I genuinely don't know what it's telling you about the business.

This sounds obvious, but it's violated constantly. Teams put "MRR" or "tickets closed" or "active users" on a board, report the figure each week, and nod. But a figure with nothing to compare it against can't be on or off track — it can't be red or green — so it quietly becomes wallpaper. The target is what gives the number a job. Without one, you're back in the car with no destination, moving confidently in some direction you never chose.

Where the target comes from: top-down meets bottoms-up

Good targets came from two directions at once, and which direction depended on the kind of number. The big lagging outcomes — revenue, ARR, MRR growth — came top-down: we started from the annual plan, broke it into quarters, then into weekly numbers. Those targets aren't really negotiable from below; they're what the business committed to.

The leading inputs were built the other way, bottoms-up. The team leads who owned them had the raw material to set a real number: historical data, conversion rates, lead volumes, last period's actuals, all sense-checked against the annual plan. A VP of Sales setting a weekly Demos Completed target isn't guessing — they're working from what the funnel has actually produced and what it needs to produce to hit the plan. The outcomes divide down from the top; the inputs build up from what the owner knows is achievable. A good scorecard is where those two meet.

Real, not aspirational

The single most common way to ruin a target is to set it aspirationally high — the big stretch number that would be amazing if you hit it. Here's what actually happens when you do.

A red that shows up every single week stops meaning "pay attention here" and starts meaning "ignore this, it's always like that." You've trained the team to tune out the exact signal the scorecard exists to send. The fix is to ground targets in what's actually achievable, plus a real but reachable stretch — and to sense-check them against peer data. What's a best-in-class NRR or GRR for a SaaS business your size? If your target is wildly outside the benchmark in either direction, it's probably wrong, and the benchmark will tell you before a quarter of red weeks does.

What red and green are actually for

The color coding exists to communicate, at a glance, how you're scoring against the goal — nothing more. We kept it concrete: red was more than 20% off the target, yellow was a 10–20% variance, and green was within 10% of goal or better. Anyone could scan the board in five seconds and know where to look.

The thing that makes or breaks this is what red means culturally. Red is not a grade and not a blame signal. Red means: this goes on the issues list, and we brainstorm it. When Demos Completed went red for a few weeks running, we didn't ask whose fault it was — we asked how to fix it. Should we test a new call-to-action or placement on the marketing site? Put it in our email sequences? Have Customer Care proactively offer to book demos? Which lead sources drive the most demos, and should we invest more there? A red number in the weekly meeting is the start of a problem-solving conversation, not the end of a performance review. Get that culture right and people surface their own reds early; get it wrong and they hide them.

Set it once — then don't move the goalposts

The metric owner set their own target, and the leadership team reviewed it — ownership with a sanity check. Then we reset targets on a fixed schedule: once a quarter, as part of QBR planning. Between those resets, the rule was simple and we held it hard: don't move the goalposts.

Moving a target mid-quarter because you're behind is a slippery slope to a scorecard that means nothing, because every uncomfortable number can be massaged away. There's an exception for genuinely broken targets — a big, obvious miss where the number was simply set wrong — but that should be rare. As a rough governor: maybe one metric a quarter gets a mid-stream reset, not a third of the board. The discipline of living with a target you set is most of what makes the red and green mean anything at all.

Realistic, but ambitious

If you're setting your first scorecard targets, the trap to avoid is the aspirational one — the unachievable number that feels motivating in a planning session and is just demoralizing by week three. It's counterproductive: it trains the tune-out. Aim instead for the harder thing, which is to be realistic and ambitious at the same time, holding both in your head without letting either win outright.

Practically, that means a few habits: set a target on every number, use a mix of leading and lagging so you have goals you can act on this week and not just outcomes to report, and sense-check all of it against SaaS industry benchmarks so your ambition is calibrated to reality. Do that, and the scorecard stops being a dashboard you glance at and becomes the thing you actually steer with. You've picked a destination — now the numbers can tell you whether you're on the road to it.