Product Opportunity Evaluation Matrix - Poem Matrix
POEM (the Product Opportunity Evaluation Matrix) scores each candidate product idea against five forces - customer, product, timing, competition and finance - so you can compare opportunities side by side instead of arguing about which one feels right.
Five spokes radiate from a shared centre, each tipped with one of the forces weighed before a green light.
Reach for this when…
- You've got a shortlist of product ideas and everyone's favourite is different.
- Innovation meetings keep re-litigating the same ideas without deciding anything.
- You need to justify to a board why you picked one idea over three others.
How to run it
- List every candidate opportunity, one line each, no elaboration yet.
- Score each opportunity A to F against the five forces: customer, product, timing, competition and finance.
- Use the stated truths under each force as the test for the grade, not gut feel.
- Average the five scores per opportunity and rank them.
- Commit real budget only to the top two or three; park the rest.
A worked example
Situation. Chen Yu-Ting ran ChiFan, a food-delivery app in Taichung, Taiwan, with six new feature ideas competing for the same small dev team.
Applied. She scored all six ideas against the five forces with her product lead, using actual support-ticket volume as evidence for the customer force and real revenue projections for the finance force.
Result. Two ideas came out with the highest average scores; the other four were parked in writing, which ended the recurring argument about them.
The catch
The grades are still judgement calls dressed up as a scorecard, and two people scoring the same idea against the same five truths can land on different letters. It also treats each force as equally weighted, when for most businesses one or two of the five - often finance or timing - actually decide the outcome.
An A on customer doesn't offset an F on finance - the five forces don't trade off against each other, whatever the average suggests.
Origin: Neal Cabage