# Why I Keep Revenue Goals Out of My Vision

> Putting a revenue number in your strategy caps what teams build toward. Here's a different approach, backed by a platform that hit $3.86B without one.

Published: 2024-08-13 · Updated: 2026-06-23 · Topics: Product Strategy & Development, Digital Transformation · Author: Alan Wizemann

Nearly every business book I have ever read puts a revenue goal squarely inside the vision, and I have come to do the opposite. I am well aware this runs against most of what gets treated as standard practice. The reason is fairly simple, and it has held up across enough teams that I trust it now. When you put a specific number into your strategy, you inadvertently cap what your team is going to do. People are naturally wired to drive positive results, and if you give them a direction along with the space to figure out how to get there, they will very often go further than any number you could have written into a slide deck. Put the number in, though, and the dynamic inverts entirely – they aim for it, they hit it, and then they stop, because the number told them where the finish line was.

There is a second problem that sits underneath the first one. Metrics in a vision statement are not actually motivating in the way that people tend to assume they are. A line like "grow revenue by twenty percent in three years" does not make a single person excited to come to work. What it does is make them track toward twenty percent, which is not at all the same thing as building something great. The teams I have worked with consistently do their best work when they are chasing a problem or an opportunity (the kind of thing that has texture and meaning to it), rather than when they are chasing a percentage that exists mostly for the benefit of a board slide. So the obvious question is what the alternative actually looks like in practice, because "no number" is not a strategy on its own.

The strategy and the vision I put together are directional, deliberately so. At Southern Glazer's, the whole of it comes down to connecting the network: how do we get suppliers closer to customers, through us? That is the direction, and it points squarely at an opportunity without telling the team exactly how to reach it and without a specific revenue number hanging off of it. What it does instead is give people a canvas to work from. At the team level, inside that broader direction, we absolutely do track metrics. Our OKR culture runs on targets that are genuinely attainable alongside "hero" targets that would be exceptional if a team got anywhere close to them. But those live at the product team level, inside the mission, rather than sitting on top of the whole vision. The distinction matters more than it might seem, because those internal metrics exist to show progress and help teams self-correct, not to define and therefore limit what the product is ultimately allowed to become.

The best evidence I have for this approach is, fittingly enough, a product I did not actually build. Proof, Southern Glazer's e-commerce platform, launched about six years ago, well before my time here. From what I understand of its history the initial vision for it probably did not carry a revenue number either. The people who built it understood that it was so new, and so different from anything the company had attempted before, that they had to create space for it to discover what it could become rather than pinning it to a target up front. They were not flying completely blind – they had some sense of what e-commerce had already done in other industries – but they were not locked into a number that would have quietly defined success too early. That platform did $3.86 billion in revenue in 2024. Proof launched right before the pandemic, and some of that growth was undeniably timing, the world moving online at the exact moment the platform happened to be there and ready. But the more interesting question, the one I keep turning over, is why Proof was ready when the moment came. The answer is that the team had been building toward an open-ended opportunity rather than toward a fixed number, so when the circumstances changed dramatically the product had the flexibility to absorb the change and grow into it.

I think about all of this when I am working on the current generation of things we are building. The instinct, especially when you are asking for budget and executive support, is always to put a number on it, to make it concrete, to stand up and say here is what this will generate. Sometimes you genuinely have to, because not every organization is ready to fund a direction without a specific destination attached, and pretending otherwise would just be naive. But wherever I can avoid it, I do, because there is a counterintuitive thing that happens when you remove the big revenue goal from the vision. People stop being afraid to build something ambitious. When the number is sitting there, every decision gets filtered through it – will this feature help us hit the number, will this architectural choice get in the way of it – and the number generates a kind of gravity that pulls everything toward itself and away from the harder, more important question of whether you are actually building something people want.

The other tool I have found that can stand in for the metric as a signal of progress is what we call power weeks. Once a month, the entire company can see what we are building. And I do mean the actual working products in whatever state they happen to be in, not polished presentations, including the things that plainly did not work. If we tested something and it failed, we say so out loud, we talk about what we learned from it and what we are doing instead, and that openness does several things at once. It creates real internal accountability without our needing a banner metric to point everyone at. It builds genuine trust that the team is working and thinking rather than just shipping features nobody uses. And it creates the conditions for ideas from other parts of the organization to surface, because people can see the work and find themselves thinking what if we did this with our data, or we have been trying to solve that exact problem on our side. None of this means there is no accountability in the system; the accountability is simply pointed differently, at questions like are we building something real, are we solving the right problem, are we learning from the things that are not working. Those are harder questions than "did we hit twenty percent," and in my experience they produce both better answers and better products, because the goal of a vision was never to be a scoreboard – it is to point people at something genuinely worth building, and when you get that part right, the numbers tend to follow on their own.

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