The RICE prioritization framework was created by the team at Intercom, a company offering a messaging platform that helps businesses connect with customers, has been influential in introducing and popularizing several product management methodologies, including the RICE framework. It's a framework designed to help prioritize product features and ideas by evaluating them across four dimensions: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. This method helps product managers and teams make more informed decisions about where to allocate resources by assessing the potential value of different initiatives relative to their costs.
Let's break down each component of RICE:
Reach measures how many people you expect to be affected by a project or feature in a given time frame (e.g., a month, a quarter). This could be the number of users who will use a new feature, the number of customers impacted by an improvement, or the audience size for a marketing campaign. The goal is to quantify the scale of the potential effect.
Impact assesses the degree to which a project or feature will contribute to your goals. It's often estimated using a qualitative scale (e.g., "massive", "high", "medium", "low") and then converted into numerical values for calculations. Impact can reflect increases in revenue, improvements in customer satisfaction, enhancements in product quality, or any other goal relevant to your organization.
Confidence accounts for how certain you are about your estimates of Reach and Impact. It's a way to factor in the reliability of your data or assumptions. Confidence is usually expressed as a percentage (100% being completely certain) and adjusts the influence of Reach and Impact on the final score. Lower confidence levels might lead to prioritizing projects with more predictable outcomes.
Effort measures the total amount of work required to complete a project or feature, often counted in person-months or another time unit. This component helps ensure that the potential benefits of a project are considered relative to the investment needed to achieve them. Projects that require less effort but yield high benefits are generally prioritized.
The RICE score is calculated by multiplying Reach, Impact, and Confidence, and then dividing by Effort:
This score provides a comparative metric that can be used to rank projects or features according to their expected benefit to the organization relative to the cost of implementation.