ICE Scoring Model: Perfect Solution for Early Prioritization
In the article, we discuss what is ICE score prioritization framework, what’s good and what’s bad about it, and how to fix the bad.
ICE Score Prioritization Framework Definition
- stands for Impact, Confidence, Ease
- is used to evaluate projects, features, marketing initiatives
- is used for rapid growth with limited resources
Impact
Impact ranks your tickets by the influence they have on the overall product promotion or a single objective. It’s better to identify what exactly you want your team’s efforts to impact and stick to the Impact definition through all the tickets. You shouldn’t evaluate Job A as impacting the Activation, and Job B — Retention. Such prioritization will scatter your team’s efforts, moving the desirable results far away.
Answers the question: How impactful is this solution to our objective?
Originally measured: Number range from 1 to 10.
Confidence
Confidence score is used to support or skepticize the Impact and Ease estimates. This criterion helps to control the emotionality and subjectiveness of the prioritization. We all tend to assign bigger scores to ideas we want to be developed. High Confidence scores mean you have enough data to prove your estimates.
Answers the question: How sure am I in my Impact and Ease scores? How sure am I this works as expected?
Originally measured: Number range from 1 to 10.
Ease
Ease ranks the tickets by the cheapness of the implementation. Unlike most other frameworks that usually estimate the negativity of efforts, ICE looks at the same idea from the other side. As such, the easier and simpler the job is, the higher scores it receives.
Answers the question: How easy is this solution to develop and launch? How fast can we get the results?
Originally measured: Number range from 1 to 10.
How to calculate
Add up Impact, Confidence, Ease.
Sometimes the sum is also divided by three, but that doesn’t change the priority ranking order.
Drawbacks and Cures
Subjectiveness
In 100% of cases, ICE is criticized for its subjectiveness — the priorities can be easily manipulated by such scoring, and different people will score criteria differently.
1. Any framework can be manipulated if needed. There is nothing special about ICE. The question is, why even starting the prioritization if you still want to make the world revolve around your humble opinion?
2. The story about different people estimating all the tickets differently can be turned into a powerful weapon if you let them all evaluate the initiatives how they think is appropriate.
According to multiple studies, the average guess of a group of people is astonishingly accurate. So just aggregate their scores and calculate the average.
This may sound difficult, but it is super simple with automation tools. Ducalis, for example, will do everything for you. You don’t even need to video chat with your teammates. Open the browser tab, put the scores, pet the cat while waiting for your colleagues to do the same. After all the scores are assigned, open the Top Priorities — your astonishingly accurate ticket ranking is ready.
Scale
What we do consider a drawback are the numbers you actually use for estimation. The range from 1 to 10 is too precise. How on Earth can you decide if the initiative will impact the objective by 6 or by 7?
Such estimation will take you too much time on redundant doubts, and the ticket rankings will never become solid and systematic.
For this, we’ve changed 1–10 range for the Fibonacci sequence. It is much easier to decide if it’s a 5 or 8 impact.
→Try ICE template for feature prioritization
→Try ICE template for marketing prioritization
Simplicity
Another point is both a pro and a con. ICE score framework is super simple. It allows you to start prioritization immediately. The estimation itself will be fast, and you will have the list of quick wins in no time.
ICE is perfect when you need rapid growth at the start. But in the long run, it is oversimplified and may make things worse for complex products.
Don’t hesitate to start with ICE. Just customize it over time by adding your unique criteria to consider multiple key factors.
→ Visit our prioritization templates library
→ Sign Up at Ducalis, connect two-way sync with your task tracker, automate your prioritization process, and create a team evaluation habit.
