Prioritise better with ICE Scoring — Pitch Hive Brief

“When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the trivial many. When they have sufficient levels of clarity, they are capable of greater breakthroughs and innovations”

Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

What is the ICE scoring model?

• A decision-making tool to help you prioritise ideas
• Commonly used by product managers to prioritise product features
• Can also be used more broadly as a decision-making tool, to help decide what to focus on

What does ICE stand for?

• Impact: what would the successful outcome be? Key benefits for a user/target KPIs
• Confidence: how much belief do you have in being able to achieve the desired ‘impact’?
• Effort: how easy will it be to develop, test and launch?

How to calculate an ICE Score

• For each idea, assign a numeric value between 1 and 5 for ‘I’, ‘C’ and ‘E’ (using 1–5 opposed to 1–10 is easier and quicker)
• Multiply each value together to generate a numeric ‘ICE score’ for each idea
• Prioritise the idea(s) with the highest ICE score first

Download our Free ICE Scoring Template Tool

Advantages of using ICE scoring

• Simple, quick & intuitive
• Provides a numeric score for easy ranking

Problems with using ICE scoring

• Subjective scoring, you need to be systematic and consistent when scoring each element of ICE
• Only useful to compare the ‘same type’ of ideas i.e. relative scoring
• Limited in scope, only considers three factors (I, C and E)

Considerations for founders

• Be careful if something is too easy! Think about building your competitive advantage
• Focus on the end-user, will this ‘Impact’ help you achieve Product-Market Fit?
• Regularly review your priorities, has anything changed? Do you need to adjust?

Further Reading:

How Investors Think — Pitch Hive Brief

Product-Market Fit — Pitch Hive Brief

Startup unit economics — what CAC and LTV mean and how to calculate them

Zero to One: Notes on Start-Ups, or How to Build the Future

The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses