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NASA's Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite‐2 (ICESat‐2) mission launched in September 2018 and is now providing high‐resolution surface elevation profiling across the entire globe, including the sea ice cover of the Arctic and Southern Oceans. For sea ice applications, successfully discriminating returns between sea ice and open water is key for accurately determining freeboard (the extension of sea ice above local sea level) and new information regarding the geometry of sea ice floes and leads. We take advantage of near‐coincident optical imagery obtained from the European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel‐2 (S‐2) satellite over the Western Weddell Sea of the Southern Ocean in March 2019 and the Lincoln Sea of the Arctic Ocean in May 2019 to evaluate the surface classification scheme in the ICESat‐2 ATL07 and ATL10 sea ice products. We find a high level of agreement between the ATL07 (specular) lead classification and visible leads in the S‐2 imagery in these two coincident images across all six ICESat‐2 beams, increasing our confidence in the freeboard products and deriving new estimates of the sea ice state. The S‐2 overlays provide additional, albeit limited, evidence of the misclassification of dark leads due to clouds. Dark leads are no longer used to derive sea surface and thus freeboard as of the third release (r003) of the ICESat‐2 sea ice products. We show estimates of lead fraction and more preliminary estimates of chord length (a proxy for floe size) using two metrics for classifying sea surface (lead) segments across both the Arctic and Southern Ocean for the first winter season of data collection. Key Points: Specular leads in ICESat‐2 show strong agreement with leads observed in coincident Sentinel‐2 imageryThe scenes provide further evidence of the misclassification of dark leads, which are no longer used to derive freeboard in ICESat‐2 dataWe produce preliminary estimates of lead fraction and chord length across the Arctic and Southern Ocean [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]