What are ICE scores and how can they help Product Owners with Product Backlog Order

1. Introducing ICE Scores
A simple method for PO's to define a value and order items in the backlog

2. Why encourage PO’s to
use ICE Scores?

3. A PO’s primary responsibility in SCRUM is
”...maximizing the value of the product resulting from
work of the Development Team”

4. ICE Scores help to determine and show
value in an easy to consume way

5. ICE Scores (or some variation) are used by fast
growing companies like Dropbox, Slack and Canva
to deliver high value products to customers

6. What is an ICE Score?

7. ICE is an acronym for
Impact, Confidence and, Ease

8. The ICE Score is an aggregate score of the
impact, confidence and ease of a story
between 1 and 10, higher scores then
indicate a potentially higher order.

9. IMPACT
How much impact will this story have for
customers and for the organisation?

10. CONFIDENCE
How confident are we that the result of this
story will add value and do we have any
evidence to prove it’s a good idea?

11. EASE
How easy will it be for the development
team to implement this story?

12. How to use ICE Scores?

13. To determine an ICE Score, each of Impact,
confidence and ease are rated on a scale of 1 to 10
and then averaged out by division of 3

14. Items with higher scores provide
more value to the product

15. Let’s play...

16. A Product BL
- Speed up AAA API responses
- Data on the effects of Ornithology
on API migrations
- Enable an SSO solution
- Create a new endpoint for
retrieving today’s usage
contrived
^

17. Speed up AAA API responses
As a customer of the AAA API, I want responses to my requests to come back within 1 second, so that I can
respond to my own customer queries more efficiently.
IMPACT: 7 (1 Low - 10 High) CONFIDENCE: 7 (1 Low - 10 High) EASE: 3 (1 Hard - 10 Easy)
Impact for customer: 7
Our customers responding quickly to their
customers will mean they can make more revenue.
Impact for Business: 7
Faster responses mean we use less resources
which lowers our running costs. High Impact
We are confident this task will add value
We have evidence and data that confirms faster
response times increases customer satisfaction
and loyalty.
It is not so easy!
Speeding up the API to reach speeds of less than 1
second will take a concerted effort from several
departments, and a refactor of the models. We
would also need to introduce caching which has its
own problems.
ICE: 5.6
(7+7+3) / 3

18. Data on the effects of Ornithology on API migrations
As a curious person in marketing, I want data on the effects of ornithology on API migrations, so that I can
write an interesting article for my ornithology club members.
IMPACT: 1 (1 Low - 10 High) CONFIDENCE: 1 (1 Low - 10 High) EASE: 2 (1 Hard - 10 Easy)
Impact for customer: 1
Our customers responding quickly to their
customers will mean they can make more revenue.
Impact for Business: 1
We can spend a lot of time and money doing the
research but as a property research company
taking time to research ornithology is distracting
and not a strength
We are not confident
Our data is sketchy and suggests this is not
something we should really focus on. Additionally
the team is not fully aware of ornithology and are
therefore non committal
It’s not difficult as much as time consuming
This will take a team some time to put together
and come up with a suitable report. We may have
to purchase data from other sources. And we’d
have to train the team on Ornithology terms and
nuances.
ICE: 1.3
(1+1+2) / 3

19. Enable an SSO solution
As a potential customer of the API, I want SSO for my users, so that I can manage logins across all our
connected services.
IMPACT: 8 (1 Low - 10 High) CONFIDENCE: 10 (1 10 High) EASE: 5 (1 Hard - 10 Easy)
Impact for customer: 8
Dealing with enterprise level companies, easing
their sign on ability into our systems will help them
manage users and licenses more efficiently
Impact for Business: 8
Eases our sales process and helps new customers
choose our product over competitors
We are confident this will add value
Our sales team have provided detailed data
proving this is the number one request by people
deciding to license our services
It is not too hard, but still tricky!
We have to research the options available, but we
are confident a solution should already be
available and it will be a matter of tying that
solution together with our existing sign on solution
ICE: 7.6
(8+10+5) / 3

20. Create a new endpoint for retrieving today’s usage
As a customer of the API, I want to easily retrieve my daily stats, so that I can monitor my daily spend and
predict costs more efficiently.
IMPACT: 7 (1 Low - 10 High) CONFIDENCE: 8 (1 Low - 10 High) EASE: 10 (1 Hard - 10 Easy)
Impact for customer: 10
Our customers responding quickly to their
customers will mean they can make more revenue.
Impact for Business: 4
Faster responses mean we use less resources
which lowers our running costs. High Impact
We are confident this will add value
We have some data that confirms customers who
can have the control of their statistics are in
business longer therefore they will be have a
longer lifetime value.
It is very easy!
We already have the data we simply need to add
the endpoint for the customer to retrieve it.
ICE: 8.3
(7+8+10) / 3

21. A Product BL
- (IS: 8.3) Create a new endpoint for
retrieving today’s usage
- (IS: 7.6) Enable an SSO solution
- (IS: 5.6) Speed up AAA API
responses
- (IS: 1.3) Data on the effects of
Ornithology on API migrations
contrived
^

22. Questions?