We consider the snowplow model to describe the axial phase of a plasma focus device. We show that, within this framework, the dynamics of a given system can be recovered at different energetic and geometric scales. Then, we consider two different criteria that would plausibly optimize the plasma focus performance. By solving the dynamics equations for the axial phase, we estimate the values of the parameters that do indeed satisfy the aforementioned criteria and compare those values with the corresponding ones attached to few practical devices.