Ukrainian product management expert Oleksandr Bondar has developed a proprietary methodology for assessing product opportunities, which is already being used by one of the fastest-growing venture funds in the country. Let’s take a look at how POVM changes the logic of making investment and product decisions.
Ukrainian product management expert Oleksandr Bondar has developed a proprietary methodology for assessing product opportunities, which is already being used by one of the fastest-growing venture funds in the country. Let’s take a look at how POVM changes the logic of making investment and product decisions.
According to CB Insights, 42% of startups fail due to lack of market demand. Harvard Business School cites an even more critical statistic: two-thirds of venture projects never reach profitability. In many cases, the risk of such an outcome could have been identified before development began.
Oleksandr Bondar is a Ukrainian Product Management expert with over six years of experience in building digital products for the Ukrainian and European markets. In 2016-2019, he developed his own branding agency Bondar Creative, in 2019-2021 he headed the WebHub platform with a team of 25 specialists, and since 2021 he has been working as a Product Innovation Strategist, combining the roles of a product advisor, investment expert, and author of his own evaluation methodology. Thus, POVM appeared — a scoring system for assessing product opportunities before investing significant resources in development.
Product teams use Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Jobs To Be Done to explore user needs and iteratively develop. But when it comes to choosing between multiple ideas to invest in, the final decision often comes down to individual experience and intuition.
Oleksandr Bondar explains: «Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Jobs To Be Done work great for understanding users and iterative development. But when it comes to a specific choice, for example, which of the five ideas to invest resources in, the team is left alone with its intuition.»
This gap between discovery tools and the moment of making an investment decision became the main reason for Oleksandr to formulate POVM: a methodology that takes the results of previous research and transforms them into a structured resource decision.
The product backlog can accumulate dozens of proposals from users, sales teams, and management. Each of them seems promising, but resources allow only a few initiatives to be taken on. The wrong choice can mean two or three months of team work and tens of thousands of dollars in costs.
POVM evaluates each product opportunity across five categories:
Each category is scored from 1 to 5. The model sets two thresholds for a GO solution: an average score of at least 3.0 and no category with a score of 1. The key here is the critical score rule: a score of 1 on at least one dimension automatically means NO-GO regardless of the overall result. This prevents strong market potential or compelling technology from masking a fundamental problem on the other side — for example, with access to customers or the team’s ability to implement the project.
Lean Canvas helps capture a business model, but it doesn’t itself determine how attractive a product opportunity is. Design Thinking helps find solutions. Jobs To Be Done explains user motivations. All of these methods are powerful discovery tools, but none of them contain a clear rule by which a team can move from «interested» to «invest» or from «promising» to «decline». POVM, in turn, answers the previous question of whether it is worth investing in finding and creating a solution for a specific problem and market.
The methodology does not replace product discovery, customer development, or MVP testing. It complements these processes with a structured assessment before development begins.
Among the first to start using POVM was the venture fund QPDigital, recognized as the fastest growing venture fund in Ukraine in 2021. The fund team invests in AI, blockchain and digital health startups and regularly evaluates new investment opportunities. Since mid-2021, the fund has started using POVM to structure the deal evaluation process. Oleksandr personally adapted the methodology to the specifics of the fund’s investment flow and accompanied the implementation at all stages: developed the criteria structure, set the passing thresholds, calibrated the model together with the investment team and checked the first assessments until the methodology became an internal working practice of QPDigital.
Yuriy Sereshchenko, Managing Director of QPDigital, says: «Before the implementation of POVM, the assessment was based on the experience and intuition of partners. Everyone looked at the deal through the prism of their own experience: someone paid more attention to the team, someone to the market, and someone to the technology. Now we have a common language and specific criteria that can be substantiated by data.»
In the second half of 2021, the fund applied the methodology to over 50 startup opportunities. The average deal evaluation time was reduced from 18 to 8 days, almost halving. Approximately 36% of the reviewed opportunities were stopped due to critical risks before full due diligence was completed — one of them was an AI startup with compelling technology and a strong presentation, which received a critically low score in the Market Accessibility category. The team did not have a proven channel to reach the stated customers, and the expected sales cycle did not match its financial resources.
With an average QPDigital investment check of about $500,000, the NO-GO recommendation avoided potential risk of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Venture studios are also showing interest in the methodology. Kyrylo Sygyda, co-founder of Reface and venture studio «Pawa», notes that POVM is used as a reference for evaluating ML and AI product ideas:
«POVM provides a structured answer. Instead of intuition, we have criteria with cutoff thresholds. This is especially important for AI projects where the risks of technical implementation are high.»
In early 2022, POVM was used within the Discovery fintech project ONx — the concept of a multi-currency digital wallet and an alternative acquiring network. The methodology helped structure the assessment of key product assumptions, including the feasibility of a blockchain solution, the realism of a zero-cost strategy, the accessibility of target markets, and the technical feasibility of the concept, as well as identify areas for further testing to develop the Product Vision and define future MVP boundaries.
The duration of the POVM assessment depends on the complexity of the product opportunity and the availability of market data. The team collects information for each category, records arguments, makes assessments, and discusses disagreements.
The main value of such a process is not only in the final score. The team gets a common frame of reference, can explain the decision to stakeholders, and see the weaknesses of the product opportunity before development begins.
POVM, like any framework, needs to be adapted to the specifics of a particular organization. The quality of the assessment depends on the availability of market data and the team’s willingness to invest time in a structured process at an early stage.
At the same time, such initial work can save months of development. When the cost of an MVP is measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, a systematic assessment of product capabilities becomes a practical way to reduce the risk of misinvestment.
POVM offers companies and venture teams a clear mechanism for choosing between product ideas. It allows decisions to be based on data and agreed-upon criteria, rather than relying solely on intuition.
