Prioritze objectives with the ICE model

- [Brad] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole, and today I want to share with you the method that I use to prioritize ideas and objectives for my growth teams. Now, whenever you're considering a product rollout, or managing a series of ideas for how to impact your growth, there are a dozen frameworks that you can look at to help you figure out priorities. The one that I like to use is called, ICE, and it stands for impact, confidence, and ease. When you multiply these together, you get your ICE score. The idea here is that you're going to estimate the impact, the confidence and ease on a scale of one to 10. And then you'll be able to multiply those together to get your ICE score, and then you can sort by the highest to lowest ICE score. This way you can quickly determine which of the objectives are worth doing, and which should be prioritized. And it'll allow you to recalibrate what you should be working on. Here's how to get started. First, you need to gather your ideas. And you want to encourage everyone in your team to provide ideas. It doesn't matter where the ideas come from, how many there are, whether they're good or not, simply open up the floor for ideas. Next, you need to rank these ideas. Start by looking at their impact. You have to use your gut on a lot of these. So you're staring at this problem and you're asking yourself, how much of an improvement will this have? And how significantly could it contribute to this goal? Now the goal could be generate more sales, the goal could be get more signups. The goal could simply be to eliminate a hurdle in the funnel. You want to take that objective and say, one if it's very little impact, and 10 if it's going to be a game changer. Next, you need to indicate your confidence that the impact will be true. So, how confident are you that this will be a game changer, and how confident are you that it's going to have very little impact? The score that I like to use for confidence is zero means this is strictly a hunch. We have nothing to back this up. Two is anecdotal. So a three suggests that you have market data to support this decision. Now a five would mean that you have hard evidence. This could be a competitor publishing a case study. This could be somebody in the company indicating that this was true. Or this could simply be something that you've seen, observed elsewhere. Now a six plus is going to be actual test data. This is coming from within, this is something that you've run, you know it to be true. Now, obviously there is some variance in between these numbers, so if you have a little bit of market data mixed with a little bit of evidence, versus say it's anecdotal with a stretch on market data, you could move in between these numbers. You don't have to use whole numbers, you can do 2.5, 3.5 and so on, it's really up to you. And finally, indicate the ease, how much time and effort will it take? Zero is incredibly difficult, and 10 is effortless, it's very easy. To show you how this looks in practice, you can simply build a Google Sheet, throw all the ideas, and then simply measure these values. So let's say I want to create a drip campaign for anyone who abandons a cart. I'd say that has a good impact. I am very confident, given we have previous data that suggests this works. And I think it's moderately difficult to implement, I have to work with the product team, I'd have to create the triggers, I'd have to develop the drip campaign, graphic design is involved. And what I've done is I've simply said, impact time confidence times ease. So that pulls out a score. Add a popup on a blog to capture email addresses. Well, just because someone puts their email address in, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to drive more sales. So if maybe the impact is lower. I am very confident that the impact is low. But the ease is a 10. Well, interestingly, even though this has a lower impact, it has much higher ease and much higher confidence which means it's something that you would prioritize over creating that drip campaign. It's simply low-hanging fruit. Now this is not intended to be a perfect system for prioritizing ideas. You might look at the ICE score and say, you know, there's no way that adding a popup is better than a drip campaign, in which case your scoring is simply wrong. Perhaps you need to lower your confidence or your ease, and so on. But this is a good way to relatively prioritize. It'll help you get out of choice paralysis and have a formulaic way to be decisive. Use it as an exercise and include appropriate members of your team. Thanks for checking in this week, as always, I'd love to hear from you. So connect with me on Twitter via @bradbatesole, or on LinkedIn, I'd love to know how you prioritize.