The Focus course is built around one question. Given more validated market problems than the company can fund, which ones does it pursue. Opportunity scoring is the mechanism, and the Strategy Matrix is the gate that sits in front of it.
Strategic fit comes first
An opportunity that does not fit the company's strategy is declined regardless of its attractiveness. This is a gate rather than a score, because a weighting can be outvoted by a large enough market size and a gate cannot.
The check has two halves. Does this opportunity sit in a market the company has chosen to be in, and does winning it depend on something the company is distinctively good at. An opportunity that fails the second half is a fair fight against every competitor, which is an expensive place to start.
Criteria that hold up
Market impact. How many people in the defined segment have the problem, how urgent it is, and what they would pay. This comes from the market problems work rather than being estimated fresh.
Competitive landscape. Who already addresses this, how well, and what the buyer currently does instead. A crowded space is not automatically excluded, but winning in one requires a named advantage.
Investment required. Build effort, and everything after it. Support, enablement, channel changes, ongoing operations. Comparing candidates on build cost alone favours whatever is cheapest to code and most expensive to run.
Revenue and margin potential. New revenue, retained revenue, and the cost to serve.
Risk and time to evidence. How long until the company knows whether it was right, and what it will have spent by then.
Consistency rather than objectivity
The number is not truth. Estimates are estimates and weights encode a view of what the company values. What the model provides is that every candidate is asked the same questions, so two opportunities can be compared on the same basis and neither wins on presentation quality or on who is presenting it.
The second benefit is auditability. When a request is declined, the person who raised it can see which criterion it fell down on and what would have to change. That is a far better conversation than an unexplained no, and it occasionally produces the evidence that changes the answer.
Where the numbers come from
Scoring is only as good as the market work behind it. Foundations produces the validated problems and the sized segments. Focus turns them into comparable candidates. A scoring exercise run over a list of internally generated ideas produces a confident ranking of guesses.