Step 3:
Define Product Performance Requirements

Once workloads and metrics have been specified, the next question is:

What is satisfactory performance for this product?

This question is best answered by a joint effort of the marketing and architecture/development teams for a new product. Explicit performance goals are essential for two reasons. They guide development and reduce the chance that developers will either introduce a performance bottleneck or spend time optimizing a component that already has adequate performance. And setting numeric performance goals at a project's start eliminates confusion at its end as to whether or not product performance is acceptable.

The role of the performance analyst (whether an employee or a consultant) is to facilitate translating business-level goals to unambiguous and realistic performance requirements. For example, the initial goal for a new network processor may be to "run at 10 gigabits/second." After discussion, this might be refined to a testable goal: "do 5-tuple classification and forwarding on 20 million 64-byte packets per second."