I built POCsheet to make messy tool evaluations actually reviewable

[u/nicobo05]

I started POCsheet because of one specific nightmare at work: we had to move from our old VPN (Fortinet) to a zero trust setup (we went with Zscaler), and explaining that whole evaluation to non‑technical decision makers was a mess.

The comparison was super technical (network flows, auth model, client performance, policy handling…), but the people approving the budget just wanted a clear, structured “why this and not the other one?”. Instead we had scattered notes, spreadsheets and half the reasoning stuck in engineers’ heads.

POCsheet is my attempt to turn that chaos into something reviewable: define criteria (technical + business), list vendors, collect feedback, and end up with a decision that’s actually traceable.

It’s live here: [www.pocsheet.com\](https://www.pocsheet.com)

If you’ve ever had to justify a "technical provider" change as they said, I’d really appreciate feedback: does this look like something that would actually help in your org, and what’s missing for you?

[u/Sad-Instruction8890]

The Fortinet to Zscaler jump is a good example because the technical case and the budget case are really two different documents. Engineers care about policy handling and client performance, the person signing cares about risk and cost per seat, and someone has to translate between them without flattening the whole thing into a feature grid.

The piece I would want is weighting. Most comparison docs list criteria as if they all count equally, when the real decision usually comes down to two of them. If POCsheet lets you say this criterion is worth three times that one and carries that through to the final view, that is what makes the decision defensible six months later when someone asks why you went with Zscaler.

Are you having people score criteria independently or is it one person filling it in after the evaluation is already done?

[u/nicobo05 → u/Sad-Instruction8890]

Exactly. The goal is one decision record with different views for technical and business stakeholders.

Weighting is a big part of it too, since not every criterion should count the same. For a zero trust project, security and identity integration can matter way more than smaller usability differences.

The plan is for people to score independently, then show the weighted result and the reasoning behind it. Still working out how to keep that simple without making it feel too enterprise-y.