ICE Score
Score an idea on Impact, Confidence, and Ease to propose execution priority.
When to use
- •To quickly order an idea backlog and select items for exploration
- •When you have at least some explicit evidence and a rough effort estimate
- •Before drafting experiment plans for a leaf opportunity
Input
- •Idea title and description: goal, target metric, scope, and working hypothesis
- •Idea analysis and current state: data/user/market/test evidence, risks, and effort estimate
- •Optional: target metric change (%), estimated effort (person-weeks)
Output
- •Format: Markdown (
.md) - •Location:
initiatives/[initiative]/solutions/ - •Filename:
ice-[YYYY-MM-DD]-[slugified-idea-title].md
Scoring quick reference
- •Impact: Map expected metric change (%) to 0-10 scale
- •Ease: Map estimated effort (person-weeks) to 10-1 scale
- •Confidence: Sum weighted evidence contributions with group caps
- •ICE Score = Impact x Confidence x Ease
Priority buckets
| Score | Guidance |
|---|---|
| >= 250 | Consider immediate execution (high expected ROI) |
| 150-249 | Promising; recommend additional precision testing |
| 100-149 | Proceed with mitigations or phase-two testing |
| < 100 | On hold or needs strengthening |
Guardrails
- •Do not invent or infer evidence
- •Exclude evidence not directly tied to Impact from Confidence
- •When uncertain, apply conservative caps
- •Prevent duplicate counting of the same source
For the full scoring model, evidence types, confidence calculation, and report format, see references/ice-scoring-model.md.
Follow the writing standards in _shared/writing-standards.md for all outputs.