I guess I'm asking if you have a heuristic for what's a good enough desired next state.
So if the desired state is "New feature X generates Y new revenue per month" then we need to define the state map of the system where that would be true.
That begs many questions then, which reveal our state variables:
"What feature metrics do we bill for, in what increments, and on what frequency?" - Business Model
"What scale is required for that transaction frequency?" - Infrastructure planning
"What amount of downtime can we afford and still meet y goal" - Observability Requirements
"What tools do we add to help us build?" - Development Environments/Practice
etc... until everyone is satisfied that you can map the current state of things, through this transition matrix of questions and into the goal state.
The other piece is having an accurate map of the current state of all your dependencies - including people, time, money, focus, etc...