Product Management Craft · 18 min · 130 XP
Prioritising with RICE, and its limits
Score options with RICE to make the trade-offs visible, then treat the score as the start of the argument, not the end of it.
Every team has more good ideas than capacity. Without a method, the backlog gets ordered by who asked loudest, who asked last, or who is most senior. A scoring model doesn't make the decision for you. What it does is make everyone's assumptions visible and comparable, so the argument is about “do we really think this reaches 2,000 people?” rather than “I just feel it's more important”.
The most widely used model is RICE, from Intercom. Score each idea on four things: - Reach: how many people or events it affects in a set period, such as customers per quarter. - Impact: how much it moves the goal for each of them, on a fixed scale: 3 massive, 2 high, 1 medium, 0.5 low, 0.25 minimal. - Confidence: how sure you are of the other estimates: 100% high, 80% medium, 50% low. - Effort: total team time, usually in person-months. The score is Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort: value per unit of work, discounted by how much you're guessing.
Idea Reach/qtr Impact Confidence Effort RICE ─────────────────────── ───────── ────── ────────── ────── ───── Bulk invoice export 500 2 80% 1 800 Approval workflow 2,000 1 50% 4 250 Reminder emails 3,000 0.5 100% 0.5 3,000
Confidence is the most useful column. It's where the model punishes ideas nobody has evidence for. If an idea's score depends on 50% confidence, the best next step is often not to build it, but to run the discovery that raises or lowers that number, as in the discovery lesson.
Know what the score can't see. RICE has no column for strategy (a low-reach feature that wins a key market), dependencies (B is worthless until A exists), or obligations (legal, security, a contract promise). Its numbers also look more precise than they are. Use the ranking to start the conversation, and write down why you overrode it when you do.
Do it this week: score the top five items in your backlog with RICE. Then look at where your gut ranking and the score disagree, and write one sentence explaining each disagreement. Those sentences are your real strategy.
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