So you’ve got a successful product that is out in the market. Hopefully, you’re getting a lot of feedback about how to improve the product or service. This feedback might come from your own internal team, senior management, and most importantly your customers.

Intuitively you know that not every idea is an idea that should be acted upon, but how do you know where attention should be focused?

The first step is to collate ideas into one place. There are many ways of doing this right, from a simple spreadsheet to tools like Trello or other more sophisticated software. In my experience, when capturing ideas it is important to capture the following information:

  • Where the idea came from (customer, internal team etc.)
  • Description of the idea. This can be written by the person who had the idea, or someone else. What is important is that the person who had to read the idea can understand it. I’ve seen plenty of ideas written down that make sense to the person who wrote them (at the time) but were written without any context which makes it impossible to understand later.
  • The name of the customer or team member. This is important so you can go back to them to ask for more details when it comes time to implement. Customers love it when a company calls them up to discuss implementing one of their ideas. These people should also be the first testers of the feature, as they have a vested interest in getting it operational and will be more motivated to test.
  • When the idea was created. If you’ve been capturing ideas for a while you’ve experienced the idea graveyard — the ideas that have been sitting in the system for years, and even the person who thought up the idea in the first place has forgotten about it. The created date is very useful when it comes time to have a clean-out.
  • If more than one customer requests a feature, it is good to update the record with their details too. This adds additional “votes” to the idea as well as increases the pool of testers.

OK, so you have a pool of ideas. Now what? How do you decide on what ideas to peruse? The are many ways of tackling the problem but there are certainly some ways that are better than others.

Bad way #1: What the boss says

While senior managers may have some insight into what they think will move the need the most for the business, there are other sources which are better. While senior managers can have good insights, their ideas can also become “pet projects” which get a lot more “air time” than requests from a customer.

Bad way #2: What the customer wants

Don’t get me wrong, customer ideas are certainly important, but just because one customer wants it does not make it a great idea.

What works

There are a whole lot of factors that go into making a good decision about what to implement and what to leave on the table.

  • Do enough people need it?
  • Does it align with the business strategy?
  • Will it add value to the product?
  • Will it improve flow and save staff time?
  • What will it cost to create?
  • What will it cost to maintain?
  • Will the feature clutter the user experience?

One of the best tools I’ve come across to prioritise ideas is to use the ICE framework.

ICE

ICE is an acronym that stands for Impact, Confidence, and Effort and is a simple way of ranking ideas. The best ideas are those which:

  1. Have the greatest impact (on whatever metric you are optimizing).
  2. You have confidence you can implement and will give the impact you expect.
  3. Require little effort.

The highest ranking ideas are often referred to as “the low hanging fruit”

Implementing ICE in its most basic form involves creating a spreadsheet with all the ideas listed out. Against each idea mark them on a scale of 1–10 for Impact, Confidence, and Effort. Then simply multiply those three figures together to get the score. The higher the score, the more weight that should be given to that idea.

Scoring of ideas can be done in many ways, and depends on the organization and the personalities involved.

In a small organization, it might be that the person wearing the ‘product manager’ hat is the best person to make an executive call.

A better way is to get a small group of people together to do the scoring. It is best if this is a diverse team of people.

  • Someone from senior management is great to give insight into understanding business impact.
  • Someone from customer service is great at being the advocate for the customer.
  • Someone from the operations team can advocate for ideas that would improve efficiency.
  • Someone from the implementation team will have the best insight into the amount of effort it will take to implement (and maintain)

When I’ve done this, I’ve borrowed from the Agile playbook and made sets of cards with 1–10 and got everyone to vote by playing a card. Often there is a divergence of opinion, and this is a great opportunity to have a cross-functional conversation about priorities and the relative value of certain actions.

Once the list of priorities is sorted out, it is then a matter of doing a final pass on the list. There might be good reasons to veto certain ideas which don’t fit with the business strategy for example. Then it is a simple matter of implementation.

ICE, as a stand-alone tool is great for simple idea prioritization, however in many complex businesses, it is not sufficient alone and needs to be used in the context of a wider set of frameworks.