5.25 Define performance and environmental budgets

Set budgets, taking people, planet, and performance into account alongside baselines, targets, evidence, and resources to help meet KPIs.

Environmental budget:
Define and document clear digital sustainability budget criteria that covers impact from asset and resource creation to consumption. Communicate this to affected parties.
Performance budget:
Use a performance budget to set a target maximum size of your digital product or service to monitor and reduce impact of data transfer, file type size, and more.
Human budget:
Define KPIs around engineering hours, development time, or sprints while keeping the health and well-being of your workers paramount. Sustainably optimize workflows to allow all tasks to be performed with care.
Measurable improvements:
Establish a baseline and measurement criteria to track improvements over time. Improvement claims must be evidenced and verifiable.

Conversion
Improving performance will reduce churn and page abandonment. A website may also rank better on search engines thanks to performance being a key indicator in ranking algorithms.
Economic
Reducing resource requirements means users will not have to keep upgrading devices to match the needs of digital products and services that are otherwise growing unchecked over time.
Environment
Setting a strict sustainability or performance budget will reduce the chance of a digital product or service getting too large or resulting in pollution transfers, which will also ensure it has a minimal impact on a user’s device. This has a direct impact on emissions by forcing businesses to choose where to make reductions and efficiency savings. Users not having to upgrade devices as frequently will also reduce e-waste from discarded devices.
Performance
Keeping realistic goals regarding delivery size will push developers to optimize resource-heavy projects and reconsider using large tooling in place of lightweight alternatives. A lower target budget for a product or service will also decrease the amount of time spent transferring and rendering data.
Social Equity
By having a human or planetary budget, you can assign targets to improve services for impacted groups or those affected directly by your project.