There is a good quote that always strikes me and I believe it is a good call to action for POCs.
Our approach to making games is to find the fun first and then use the technology to enhance the fun
-Sid Meier
If you just start coding your game from idea and start throwing stuff in you are not necessarily finding the fun first. What I like to do is to figure out a cool concept, as few neat sounding game-play elements and code up some quick little programs to show off those game-play elements.
The key here is speed. Do not spend time designing an awesome architecture. Do not spend time making sure it is pretty. Get the game-play in to your own hands and see if you still think it is fun. For example, for Violent Sol Worlds we started off with the idea we wanted a top-down shooter. So I started to create a POC of a guy shooting
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This POC at first looked terrible, with borrowed graphics but I could walk around and shoot one immobile cow. It turned out that it was fun to shoot an walk around, but the addition of blood from the cow made it more fun. The feedback was the true start of fun. At that point I thought the cow was detracting from the fun because it was an innocent cow. What would it be like to shoot something that moved, and shoot stuff like a building etc?
So I quickly threw in a wall and animated a bug creature I had been drawing. It was a lot more fun to shoot something moving. But the feedback was 
all wrong now for the bugs. They would need to die. So I coded in hit points and had them disappear when it hit 0. This still broke the experience and the fun.
When I added blood and body parts from the bugs being shot and killed it changed the world. It turned from something that I would launch and stop in seconds to something I found myself playing for minutes and it was just a POC.
You see without the POC I would not have noticed so many subtle things that make the action game-play fun. It is about moving around and shooting, but it was more about what you were shooting and how it felt to shoot them than anything else. This process did not take weeks, it took hours and the learning experience it was, was worth every minute. It changes designs, it effects decisions, and best of all it’s a quick process and adds value.
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