Engineering Software Product Lines may be a strategy to reduce costs and efforts for developing software and increasing business productivity. However, it cannot be considered as a "silver bullet" that applies to all types of organizations. Companies must consider pros and cons to determine sound reasons and justify its adoption. In previous work, we proposed the APPLIES evaluation framework to help decision-makers find arguments that may justify (or not) adopting a product line engineering approach. This paper presents our experience using this framework in a mid-sized software development company with more than 25 years of experience but without previous experience in product line engineering. This industrial experience, conducted as a qualitative empirical evaluation, helped us to evaluate to what extent APPLIES is practical to be used in a real environment and to gather ideas from real potential users to improve the framework.