There are a number of product prioritization techniques. In fact, foldingburritos.com has an article with a brief intro to over 20 product prioritization different techniques.
What is RICE?
RICE is a framework that is more formulaic than some other prioritization frameworks. I believe this is helpful for organizations just beginning to develop their internal prioritization for product management.
R = Reach
Reach is a metric which is extremely fungible. In my example below I chose to use number of users who used it in a particular period.
You can also switch this to estimated uses per period or any other metric that might make sense for your application.
Why would you shift this to uses per period? Maybe there is a feature that some people would use every day (or multiple times a day).
I = Impact
Impact measures how much of difference it will make to the users who use the feature.
Impact will depend on the themes/goals of the organizations. At a high-level I usually bucket my Impact on 3 items:
- Decrease Costs
- Increase Revenue
- Improve Customer Experience
I like to measure my Impact score to one of those three; however, some organizations or teams may shrink the scope of the impact to something more specific like:
- Increasing conversion rate
- Increasing organic traffic
- Decreasing page load speed
Ultimately those map back to my 3 high-level impact buckets, but sometimes its harder to measure long term impact to the higher-level buckets immediately.
C = Confidence
How confident are you? Are you positive in your estimations?
Things that impact your confidence:
- Reach
- Impact
- Effort
It’s easy to over estimate on the reach & impact and under-estimate the Effort. I personally rarely use High.
E = Effort
One of the hardest things to estimate is Effort – especially early on when large parts of the infrastructure have to be built to provide a feature.
Things to potentially consider with Effort:
- Dependencies
- Infrastructure
- Design
- Development
- Deployment
- Documentation
- Marketing / Sales
This is an extremely difficult one to get right initially, which is why we stick to fairly large scale buckets because we aim to be directionally correct – but not perfect.
Putting RICE Together
Running through an example of the RICE approach to scoring. Here are two sample projects:
In this case although “on-boarding wizard” has a dramatically smaller reach vs “transactional emails” — it ends up with a far higher RICE score because it’s impact and confidence are higher while it’s effort is lower.
Pros & Cons of the RICE Product Prioritization Method
RICE isn’t a perfect model for prioritization (no such thing exists), but I personally find it flexible and adaptable to most product teams. However, let’s explore some Pros & Cons of the RICE methodology.
Pros for the RICE Methodology
- Pro: RICE is simple. It allows a team to adopt it and start prioritizing faster than some of the more complex product prioritization methodologies.
- Pro: It helps facilitate a common language. I believe one of the greatest challenges for product managers is keeping a common set of definitions and languages for the whole organization to share. I believe RICE is simplistic enough to help accommodate this goal very quickly.
- Pro: It is a step towards Data-driven product management. While RICE itself may not be perfect – the introduction of data into the equation helps reinforce a culture of data management to improve the RICE score’s accuracy over-time.
Cons for the RICE Methodology
- CON: Rice is simple. It lacks nuance & finesse.
- CON: It doesn’t account for dependencies.
- CON: It’s not scientific.
- CON: It’s super easy to be biased when generating scores.
- CON: It leads to guesses when data is absent. However, as mentioned earlier this actually starts to identify the need for more accurate data.
Edit: When to use RICE?
I tend to only use RICE for epics/feature level considerations. I think it is far to heavy to consider using at the story/task level.
Hat tip to: Alexandro at saasrock.com for pointing out that I forgot to mention this.
Steal My RICE Example Image
You can use this image as a quick introduction to reach inside your organization. Feel free to use it. I’d love an honorable mention, but I left it watermark free on-purpose.
Disclaimer: My Math Is Not Your Math
There are plenty of articles explaining using RICE prioritization for product management. Some are sticklers for the math weighting. I believe that you should backwards test this with some of your past projects and adjusting the weighting to what fits for your specific organization.