Of course, a product development target may have a limited budget and a deadline that must be met (e.g., a market window that, if missed, renders the project meaningless.) But such budgets or deadlines are not goals, but constraints to achieve certain functionality or quality. The true goals are usually functional (“We need these features”) or qualitative (“We need to increase the resilience of our system”). If only time and budget were important, then this would be easy to achieve: When the time is up and the budget is used up, then by definition we are done :-)

If you get goals like: “We have to reduce our operating costs by at least 30% within the next six months”, the first thing to do is to brainstorm with everyone involved to find actionable measures that will then become the goals of the project.