When I joined Calm in early 2017, we were drastically behind our main competitor in terms of key metrics like revenue, brand awareness and money raised. In the next two years, with a team that was a tenth of the size of them, we managed to overtake them in most metrics and also to become the first mental-wellness unicorn. We were amazingly still only a team of about 25 people a couple months before we signed term sheets on the valuation.
How did we accomplish this? Besides being a group of 10xers, one of our core strengths as a company has been an aggressive focus on prioritization. “What will move the needle?” We didn’t waste time on projects that wouldn’t drive growth and we were smart about the order in which we tackled the projects that would matter.
On the data team at Calm, I’ve found it tremendously helpful to have a framework that makes it it possible to turn these prioritization questions into numbers and in a way that highlights critical factors impacting whether you should prioritize work. In this article, I’ll discuss how we not only adapted the I.C.E. prioritization framework, but how we also made a useful modification to it – added the conception of Motion – and turned it into M.I.C.E.
I.C.E.: A prioritization framework
What is I.C.E.? It stands for Impact, Confidence and Ease. If you have two projects that will have an equal impact on the business’ bottom line but one is easier to complete than the other, then do the one that is easy to complete. You’ll get business value sooner and will have leftover time to work on another project. This concept of working on the project that gives the most business impact per unit of time invested is also called leverage. The ability to stay focused on the work with the highest leverage is a essential characteristic of a top-performer.
Confidence is an interesting component. We can’t always be confident that the project will have the estimated amount of impact. Multiplying impact by confidence is a way of assessing the expected value or the probable impact of a project. If two projects are both deemed to have a high impact but you are only confident that one will have the intended outcome, then clearly choose the one with the higher expected value. It can be helpful to address confidence and impact separately, in part, because sometimes, strategically, you want a balance of big bets – projects with high impact but high risk/low confidence – with projects that are more likely to work but have limited impact.
To calculate the prioritization of projects, give a numeric score to I.C.E. (e.g., 1-4) and then calculate the average to obtain expected business value per unit of employee time. Rank projects by their ICE score and then work on the projects with the highest ICE. If you have projects with a similar ICE score, then, if the impact and confidence vary between the two, you could break the tie by determining if you want more big bets or clearer, medium wins.
Motion: Adding an M to ICE
With my team at Calm, we realized that it was tremendously helpful to add Motion to ICE. Motion captures how much energy there currently is behind a project on partner teams or the broader company. Are other people ready to act on or use your work if you do it? Do they know exactly what that action will be or do they only have vague ideas? Does the project fit the company’s wider strategy and goals? If you are assessing tech debt, does it fit with your team’s mission statement? Does it improve infrastructure that will be needed for immediately subsequent projects?
Motion matters, in part, because the vast majority of projects, particularly data projects, require a hand-off to partner teams before business value can be obtained. Thus, if motion is low, even if the project does have plenty of potential, it is unlikely to lead to business value. It doesn’t matter if your churn model could lead to high business impact, if partner teams like lifecycle or product teams are not interested or ready to use the predictions to address churn. So if you don’t have motion, you may be making a mistake to prioritize that project.
A useful characteristic of motion is that it is relatively easy, compared to the other factors, to change. If it is low, but the ICE is high, then try to raise enthusiasm about the project and to get partner teams committed to working with you on the project. If you can raise the motion, then re–assess prioritization. It may be at the top of your list now.
Efforts to understand why a project has low motion can be enlightening and will usually point you towards action steps. For example, if you find that there isn’t consensus around the project or that key people don’t understand the point of the project, then, if you believe in the ICE of the project, spend time pitching it to people. If a partner hasn’t taken the time to think through what the concrete next steps will be when you hand off the work to them, then push them to do so. If they know the project won’t get prioritized without those concrete plans, they’ll be motivated to develop them. Sometimes your partner just needs time to clear other projects off their plate. If that is the case, give it some time, motion will go up and so will the project’s prioritization score. Note, sometimes you’ll realize that you are actually missing some context and that the motion is low for a good reason. If so, reassess your scores for ICE and send that project to the bottom of your backlog!
The conversations we have had with partner teams about motion have had good organizational consequences. For example, it became clear when working with our UA team that some work done by data engineering was sitting for longer than expected, waiting for someone on UA to start using the new data. We discussed how, in order to have good motion on these projects that we needed to improve the coordination in how we hand off the projects. We subsequently took steps to ensure individuals in UA were prioritizing the same projects as data engineering in the same sprint.
In sum, try scoring and ranking your projects with MICE. You’ll stay more focused on higher leverage work and the conversations that arise around the discussion of motion, will help you spot problems and identify actions for improvement.
** The idea for Motion was developed in collaboration with Ben Paul, a senior data scientist at Calm. Ben is excellent at identifying and focusing on high leverage work and turning analyses into impact.