ICE prioritization stands for Impact, Confidence, and Ease. This prioritization method was initially developed to prioritize growth experiments, but its simplicity has made it popular for all projects. The ICE approach enables the creation of new products and MVPs or prioritizes feature requests, marketing, and sales activities. The ICE framework may be considered suitable for rising and optimizing time to import, designer ROI, user retention, maximizing funnel, and more. This framework provides a quick way for teams to prioritize their efforts and maintain momentum. In addition, ICE can quickly gain consensus across the team without over-analyzing, preventing analytic paralysis.
ICE Prioritization
Prioritizing functions, initiatives, and rollouts is central to product management. Choosing the proper framework at the right stage in the process is key to success as a product manager. ICE Scoring Model is ideal for the early stages of development when product managers are full of ideas and want to keep their team going. Sean Ellis, famous for helping companies grow and creating the term “growth hack,” created the ICE Scoring Model to help companies grow. Later, product managers started using this framework to prioritize features, ideas, and rollouts.
The ICE comprehensively evaluates the function based on three levers. ICE evaluates its functionality based on three levers: Impact, Reliability, and Ease. The impact is an estimate of the optimization of the effort. Confidence is an estimate of the degree of exhaustion of the hypothesis. Ease estimates the amount of effort by the time required to ship the function/product.
How To Apply the ICE Framework?
Each assignment must be assigned three metrics: impact, Confidence, and Ease. However, do not worry. These indicators are not time-consuming, can be a point of discussion, and help create consistency.
Impact
Determine how much impact this initiative and key features will have. How much does this new feature have a positive effect on users?
- One has no effect.
- Three shallow impacts.
- 4 Low impacts
- 6 Moderate Impacts
- 8 is “high impact.”
- 10 “very high impact.”
Confidence
To set a confidence level, consider how confident product managers are that this will work. When the computer manager answers this question, think about the similar tasks before and see how they impacted and what others tried and worked.
Choose one of the following choices:
- Very unsure, “3
- Four are not confident.
- 6 “Moderate confidence.”
- 8 is “high confidence.”
- 10 is “very high confidence.”
Ease
The last indicator to be assigned is Ease. “When picking this, try asking: “How challenging is it to manage?
People tend to misunderstand this question in software development and think only about the development effort. However, it is not just coding that companies do to provide functionality. As a whole, let us think about how difficult the task is for those involved.
For example, redesigning an app’s navigation menu may be small from a coding perspective, but it may take a long time to design and take longer to update the document.
Choose one of the following choices:
- 1 “very difficult.”
- Three is “difficult.”
- 5 is Medium.
- Seven is easy.
- 10: Very Easy
Verdict
The ICE scoring design is a beautiful framework to operate fast and stay on top of the product team’s priorities. ICE is not perfect and is intended to serve as a minimum viable prioritization framework. Objectively speaking, Company thinks it is a great framework that can be used when it wants to get things done quickly and prioritize ideas in its team.