ICE Scoring

Simple method of prioritization for product managers

Pavel avatar
Written by Pavel
Updated over a week ago

If you have several important and urgent features to implement, the penalty for choosing the wrong prioritization method can be rather high . ICE score method is rather simple way to get things done and prioritize your product features without extra requirements. 

What is ICE Scoring?

ICE scoring was intended to prioritize growth experiments. But now ICE is used for features prioritization as well.

How does it work?

All you need is calculate the score per idea, according to the formula:

  • Impact demonstrates how much your idea will positively affect the key metric you’re trying to improve.

  • Confidence shows how I'm sure about all my estimates - both about impact and effort (how my estimations look like a truth).

  • Ease is about the easiness of implementation. It is an estimation of how much effort and resources are required to implement this idea.

These values are rated on a relative scale of 1–10 so not to over-weigh any of them. You can choose what 1–10 means, as long the rating stays consistent. 

The goal of the ICE score

The key goal of ICE is to prevent you from being bogged down in trying to fine-tune the score too much. However, according to many experts, the method is good enough to get the job done.

ICE drawbacks

This method for prioritizing is sometimes being criticized for its subjectiveness:

  • the same feature can be scored differently by the same person at the different time. It may affect the final prioritization list.

  • if different people score a feature - they will all score it differently.

  • team members who wanted their features prioritized could simply manipulate scores to get features approved 

ICE score in Hygger

To use ICE model in Hygger, you should first collect all the ideas and product features on a Kanban-alike board. Structure them using horizontal Swimlanes and Labels. You can also adjust the process of working with features using Columns. For example, you can create the following workflow:

  • Backlog – you collect all ideas and features in this column

  • Next Up – here you move the features you want to work on

  • Specification – you gather requirements and write a specification for features

  • Development – features are under development and you can track their status here

  • Done – features were successfully delivered to your customers.

The platform offers to choose ICE score model among the scoring types.

So at first you should evaluate every feature with Impact, Confidence and Ease and get the score.

You can also view all features in the table:

So you sort features by score, get some winners from the top and send them to Development with Push option:

This type of prioritization looks rather lightweight, so you can use it on everyday basis.

Hygger also offers prioritizing according to RICE scoring model and using Weighted Scoring with custom criteria. 

In addition, if you want to learn some examples about ICE scoring, feel free to read the article on Hygger blog or watch the short video tutorial "How to manage Product Backlog and Apply ICE Prioritization".

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