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Product Prioritization: RICE
Reach. Impact. Confidence. Effort.
Welcome to ‘Product Prioritization’ — a series of tools, tips, and best practices for the skilled Product Manager to determine priorities and get results. Each time, I’ll highlight one of the dozens of popular methodologies and explain how to use it.
What is R.I.C.E?
R.I.C.E. is a prioritization technique used to get a quick score, which is used to then rank ideas or features.
R.I.C.E. is an acronym for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort
When to use R.I.C.E.?
I really like this method because it helps remove bias/opinions in ways that other prioritization techniques don’t. It’s also a really quick method to use, so you don’t spend too much time over analyzing things to extract priority.
If your team has had issues with over analyzing project value, or with stakeholders that have strong opinions which sway priorities )without data backing up those opinions), R.I.C.E. might be a great option for you.
The four categories of R.I.C.E.
The four categories used to get a score are:
- Reach
- Impact
- Confidence
- Effort
Reach
First, find out how many users will interact/use the feature.
With the people involved with prioritization, you’ll need to establish a foundation for:
- Timeframe for the user in the reach count
- Which users are included in the reach count
Timeframe: With the team, decide on the time period you want to look at. I’ve often used a quarter as the timeframe, but based on the number of users, you may want to look at a month, or a year timeframe.
The more users you have, the smaller timeframe may be able to go with.
Which Users: You’ll need to come to a consensus, who is included in the reach count. Do you want to include new users, and remove churn over the time period? Or do you want to simply use the current active user count?
