RICE Prioritization Template

How this RICE template works

This RICE template helps you to evaluate projects or ideas. Agile software teams can use this template to prioritize backlog issues, customer pain points, or experiments.

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What is the RICE Framework?

The RICE framework is a prioritization tool designed to help product managers, project teams, and decision-makers evaluate and rank projects or features based on four factors: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. This strategic framework ensures that the most valuable and impactful initiatives are identified and prioritized, helping organizations allocate their resources effectively. Here’s what each element of the RICE framework stands for:

• Reach: This measures the number of people or transactions that will be affected by a project or feature within a certain timeframe. It assesses the scale of the impact. For instance, how many users will a new feature touch over a quarter?

• Impact: This assesses the degree of change a feature or project will have on those affected. It’s often graded on a multiple-choice scale (e.g., "massive," "high," "medium," "low," or "minimal"). This helps in understanding the potential benefit to the users or the business.

• Confidence: This represents how confident the team is about their estimates of reach and impact. It is a check against over-optimism and helps to gauge the reliability of the predictions being made. Confidence levels can be expressed in percentage terms, signaling how sure the team is about their analysis.

• Effort: This estimates how many "person-months" (or days, or points in agile frameworks) it will take to complete the project or to build and implement a feature. This component helps teams to consider the cost of the initiative in terms of time and resources.

The RICE score is calculated by combining these factors into a simple formula:

RICE Score = (Reach × Impact × Confidence) / Effort

The resulting score helps teams to prioritize tasks or projects by providing a quantitative basis for comparison. A higher RICE score indicates a higher-priority initiative.

When to choose RICE

Choose the RICE framework when you need to bring clarity and objectivity into the prioritization of multiple issues or projects, e.g., when you prioritize a roadmap that spans over a several weeks or months and contains multiple important projects.

RICE helps you to clarify the priorities, even when you face the following situations:

• You have limited resources: When teams face the challenge of limited resources, the RICE framework efficiently directs attention and effort to where the greatest impact can be achieved, ensuring that every hour and dollar is spent in the most effective way possible.

• Your team has conflicting opinions: In situations where team members or stakeholders have differing opinions on what to prioritize, RICE provides an objective scoring system that can help neutralize biases and facilitate consensus based on quantifiable metrics.

• Your team faces overwhelming load: Teams overwhelmed by a high volume of potential projects or features can use RICE to cut through the clutter, bringing focus to those initiatives that offer the greatest benefits relative to their costs.

• You are afraid to make a decision: RICE is an antidote to decision paralysis when teams are faced with numerous good options and are uncertain where to begin. By providing a structured approach to evaluate each option, RICE helps to break the deadlock and move projects forward.

• Your current priorities have no clear justification: When prioritization feels arbitrary or lacks clear justification, RICE introduces a systematic approach that provides clear reasoning for why certain projects are selected over others, which is essential for transparency and accountability.

Incorporating the RICE framework when these problems arise not only alleviates decision-making stress but also leads to more strategic and impactful outcomes. It’s a solution-oriented approach that ensures resources are allocated to the most promising initiatives.

Organizational use cases of RICE

The RICE framework serves as a powerful tool for prioritization across various organizational functions. It helps teams focus their efforts where it can have the most significant impact. Here are three practical use cases for the RICE framework:

Product Backlog Prioritization

In agile product development, the RICE framework helps teams prioritize their backlog by quantifying the value of each item in terms of Reach, Impact and Confidence. The cost and time required to develop a feature is quantified as Effort. This method ensures that the development work focuses on features that provide the highest value to both the users and the business. Using our template you can split the estimation work and ensure that only developers can estimate the development effort.

Marketing Campaign Analysis

Marketers utilize RICE to discern which campaigns should be prioritized, evaluating the potential Reach and Impact against the Effort required to execute the campaign and the Confidence in the expected outcomes.

Market Opportunity Scoring

Apply RICE to score and rank market opportunities by evaluating the potential Reach of new markets, the Impact on your business, your Confidence in the opportunity's success, and the Effort required to capture the market.

Strategic Business Initiatives

Business leaders apply the RICE framework to align strategic initiatives with company goals, identifying high-impact projects and optimizing resource allocation for maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

By embedding the RICE framework into these practices, organizations can make calculated, data-driven decisions that propel growth and enhance operational efficiency.

How to estimate RICE criteria

Here's a step-by-step guide to help you through the estimation process:

Evaluate Reach: Identify the number of individuals likely to be influenced by the project during a specific period, typically a month. This figure should represent the segment of your user base that the project will touch.

Asses Impact: For SaaS products, estimate how a new feature might affect key performance indicators. For instance, if a feature could lead to 10% of your free-tier users converting to a paid plan, the monetary increase from these subscriptions would be the direct impact. Conversely, if another feature is estimated to save each user an average of two hours per week, the time saved becomes the impact, contributing to customer satisfaction and retention.

Assess Confidence Set a confidence level as a percentage to represent your certainty in the estimates of Reach and Impact, along with how they align with your strategic objectives. High confidence should be supported by solid data or previous experiences, while a lower confidence level might reflect more assumptions and unknowns.

Estimate Effort Calculate the amount of work required by your team, expressed in person-months. This should encompass all efforts across departments necessary to bring the project to fruition, from the initial concept to its market launch.

To compute the RICE score, combine your estimates using this formula:

RICE Score = (Reach × Impact × Confidence) / Effort

Practical tips for criteria estimation

• Use historical data to inform your estimates.

• Engage with cross-functional teams for a well-rounded view.

• Start with realistic estimates and prepare to fine-tune as needed.

• Regularly review and adjust your estimates to align with new insights.

• Avoid Getting Stuck on Details: Begin with your best estimate and adjust along the way. It’s more effective to update your assumptions than to delay decisions in pursuit of perfect initial estimates.

RICE Framework FAQs

How do I prioritize elements with similar RICE scores?

Look at which feature aligns better with your company goals or can be built faster. If they're still too close, pick the one you believe in more, or that customers have been asking for.

How do I balance quick wins vs. long-term projects with RICE?

Mix it up. Quick wins can show progress and keep your team motivated, but don't forget those big projects that take longer but really move the needle. Use RICE to help find a good mix.

How often should RICE scores be re-evaluated?

Check your RICE scores every few months or when something big changes in your project or business. This helps keep your priorities fresh and relevant.

What if I can't estimate the effort very precisely?

Don’t worry if you can’t nail down the exact effort. What’s more important is to get the proportions right compared to other projects. Even a rough estimate is fine as long as it helps you understand which projects are bigger or smaller in scope relative to each other. Just start somewhere and adjust as you go.

I have development effort and also marketing effort. What's a good way to estimate multiple types of effort involved?

You can slightly modify your RICE and create two separate criteria for estimating effort: one for development and one for marketing. This allows you to capture the distinct resources and time each will require, and to ease the estimation process as now marketers and developers can estimate indepentently of each other without agreeing on one value. When you calculate the final RICE score, combine these two efforts to get a complete picture of the total work involved.

What if one criterion is more important than another?

You can adjust the weight of the criteria by tweaking the formula. If you think a particular criterion, like Impact, should carry more influence for your specific project, you can increase its weight. For example, if customer retention is your focus, you may decide that the Impact score related to customer satisfaction is more critical and should be doubled in your calculations.