What is the RICE Scoring Model?
The RICE model is a useful tool for prioritizing content. It helps to identify the content that has the most reach, impact and confidence and is also an easy and quick way to prioritize tasks.
The acronym RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort. Reach refers to how many people would be exposed to the content, Impact refers to how much it will affect them, Confidence refers to how much they believe in the content or its message and Effort refers to how hard it is for them (or you) to produce it. The RICE model has four steps:
Reach: What is the potential reach of this task?
Impact: What are the potential benefits or losses from this task?
Confidence: How sure are you about the results of this task?
Effort: What is the effort required for this task?
How is a RICE score calculated?
The RICE framework, known as Intercom's internal scoring system allows you to measure your features against four factors:
Reach: How many people the feature may affect within a specified period.
Impact: How much the feature is going to impact individual users.
Confidence: How confident the company is about the feature’s impact and reach scores.
Effort: How much time the company is going to need to invest in the feature.
To calculate your RICE score
(Reach Impact Confidence) / Effort = RICE Score
Why do product managers like to use a RICE score for prioritization?
Product managers use RICE score to prioritize their backlog because it is a simple, quick and easy way of prioritizing the backlog.
It helps inform external and internal stakeholders what helped to arrive at those product decisions
It helps product managers and teams to reevaluate the metrics to grow their business.
It helps in doing data-informed prioritization.
It is used to assess feature requests, ideas, product updates and enhancements.
What are the benefits of using RICE score for prioritization?
RICE method helps you bring the entire team to a consensus since it requires estimation effort, impact analysis, etc. to be determined before development begins.
It also helps you remove biases from your prioritization since each initiative is put under a microscope by the team and evaluated objectively without any speculations. Inherent bias by one team member doesn’t let the initiative get affected.
It help product teams make better-informed decisions about what to work on first and defend those decisions to others.