Early in my career, I* noticed the allure of % goals. If I had to increase restaurant reviews, then % of users who write restaurant reviews sounded like a great goal metric for my team; if I had to increase comments, then
Fully agree with this - I've fallen into the trap of setting % goals for teams and often regretted it! I would say there's another reason they might make sense though, which in some ways contrasts your point about known distributions of the numerator and denominator. Let's say team A is focused on early churn for a new product and team B is focused on growth of that new product. If both have # goals, then team A's becomes harder or easier to hit depending on the success of team B - they are not in control of their goal! In that case I do think it's appropriate to set a % goal for team A. In other words, it's appropriate to set % goals when a # metric would have significant dependencies to the goal of another team.
Fully agree with this - I've fallen into the trap of setting % goals for teams and often regretted it! I would say there's another reason they might make sense though, which in some ways contrasts your point about known distributions of the numerator and denominator. Let's say team A is focused on early churn for a new product and team B is focused on growth of that new product. If both have # goals, then team A's becomes harder or easier to hit depending on the success of team B - they are not in control of their goal! In that case I do think it's appropriate to set a % goal for team A. In other words, it's appropriate to set % goals when a # metric would have significant dependencies to the goal of another team.
Is this really Burndown Charts vs Agile Points discourse?