The Startup Ideas Podcast
The best businesses are built at the intersection of emerging technology, community, and real human needs.
ICE Score Feature Prioritization
A scoring system for prioritizing product features using Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort to determine what to build next
How It Works
Forces teams to quantify expected impact, confidence in assumptions, and development effort for each feature idea to create objective prioritization scores
Components
List all potential feature ideas
Rate Impact (1-10): How much will this move key metrics?
Rate Confidence (1-10): How sure are you this will work?
Rate Effort (1-10): How much development time needed?
Calculate: (Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort
Rank by score and ship top 3 per week maximum
When to Use
When you have multiple feature ideas competing for development resources and need to focus on highest-value work
When Not to Use
For urgent bug fixes, compliance requirements, or when you have unlimited development capacity
Anti-Patterns to Avoid
Example
“Mobile app team has 10 feature ideas: push notifications score 8×9÷3=24, social sharing scores 6×5÷8=3.75, leaderboards score 7×8÷4=14. Build push notifications first.”
Related Knowledge
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Three-Technology Product Validation
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Start Small, Iterate Agent Development
A development approach for AI agents where you begin with the simplest possible version and progressively add complexity
validate people want to buy this thing see if you can build it
Prove market demand and distribution viability before spending time building the actual product
impact times confidence over effort put it into score
Prioritize product features using quantified impact, confidence, and effort scores rather than subjective preference