POC Best Practice

Run a clean POC.

Overview

A clean POC starts and ends on paper before it touches infrastructure. Without explicit success criteria, named owner, and end date, a POC drifts into a free trial that nobody quite finishes. Without an outcome document, the next renewal team relitigates the same questions.

• Explicit success criteria. Quantitative bar (latency, ingest rate, accuracy, cost ceiling) signed by both sides before kickoff.
• Named owner on each side. One engineer on your team plus one solutions engineer at the vendor; everyone else is a participant, not an owner.
• Bounded timeline. Two to four weeks for most POCs. Longer turns into shadow production; shorter does not test enough surface.
• Outcome documentation. Pass/fail per criterion, observed surprises, recommendation. The doc is the renewal artefact, not a sales decision.

The approach

Treat the POC as a structured experiment. Hypothesis up front, criteria pre-agreed, results documented in writing whether the answer is buy or pass.

• Pre-agreed success criteria. Sign before access is provisioned; cannot be moved mid-POC without joint sign-off.
• Bounded timeline with weekly checkpoints. Standing 30-minute weekly with both owners; flag slip on day 8, not day 28.
• Per-POC owner accountability. The owner writes the outcome doc and presents the recommendation; this is the deliverable.
• Outcome documentation. Capture pass/fail per criterion, surprises, and the conditions that would flip a pass to a fail next year.

Why this compounds

POC discipline keeps paying back: vendor calls become shorter, finalists get real evaluation, and the next renewal starts with documented data instead of memory.

• Evaluation quality. Pre-agreed criteria stop both sides from goalpost-shifting halfway through.
• Faster decision cycles. Bounded timelines force clarity instead of indefinite "we are still evaluating."
• Vendor goodwill. Vendors invest more in customers who run real POCs; relationships compound across renewals.
• Decision trail for the next renewal. The outcome doc becomes the renewal scorecard, not a cold start.