Better when you have more feature ideas to compare and need to get your team aligned on decisions.

ICE - or Impact/Confidence/Ease - forces you to think about three dimensions that founders often ignore: your confidence level in the outcome, how easy implementation really is, and whether the impact justifies the work.

The benefit is more nuanced prioritization - you can spot features that seem valuable but you have no evidence for (low confidence), or features that sound simple but require significant infrastructure (low ease).

This prioritization framework works best when you have:

• Multiple features competing for resources
• Limited data on what will actually work
• Different opinions on what should be built next

Let's use three features that a typical SaaS founder might be considering for their data import tool.

These came from our USER profile (solo founders building B2B SaaS) and represent the most common types of requests: fixing core functionality, improving onboarding, and adding "nice-to-have" features.

How ICE breaks down our examples:

Feature 1 - CSV import failing:

• Impact: 4 - High user pain, directly affects retention
• Confidence: 2 - We think it matters but haven't validated file processing complexity
• Ease: 2 - Backend changes we haven't done before
• ICE Score: 4×2×2 = 16