Once you have your feature ideas, it’s time to choose which ones are going to the product roadmap. To be able to do this you will need to prioritize them.
When you’re developing a product, there is a great number of ways you can prioritize the features on the roadmap. Whatever method you choose, it’s important to cut subjectivity out of the equation.
All those people who contributed with their feature ideas (you, your team and the users) will feel very strongly about their own ideas. But prioritization process shouldn’t be in favor of the loudest or most persuasive person.
It should be as objective as possible so that you end up prioritizing the features that are the right choice for the product and the majority of users so you can deliver the features that will add the most value first.
As we said, you can try one of the many methods to prioritize the features, but in our roadmap, we use the ICE scoring system.
The ICE framework is the feature evaluation method that relies on three factors - impact, confidence and ease.
Each of these three criteria should get a 1-10 grade and the average is considered the ICE score.
So, for example, if we have a feature called ‘Onboarding Tour’ we can grade it this way:
Impact: 8
Confidence: 6
Ease: 7
ICE Score: 7
It’s important to note that all stakeholders should be taken into account for the scoring process - including all the decision-making team members as well as users/customers. Even so, the ICE method is not perfect, as it can result in a lot of biased information.
However, ICE shouldn’t be taken too rigidly, it’s not supposed to be perfect - it’s supposed to help product owners evaluate ideas more easily and make data-driven decisions, instead of getting overwhelmed by everyone’s subjective opinions.
Once you’ve prioritized your ideas, those with the highest scores should be moved to the next column - ‘To Define’ - where you will add other important details that will be necessary for creating this feature.
So here's how you will turn an idea into a feature: