RICE stands for reach, impact, confidence and effort. This is one of the simplest frameworks to get started.
RICE Prioritization is used by product managers to figure out which of the several feature requests must be prioritized for development.
Let's understand what each of the letters mean.
Reach (R)
Indicates how many of the customers will be really impacted or how many customers find the feature really helpful.
Based on the product, reach can indicate customers, APIs, documents etc depending on the context.
Impact (I)
Indicates how a single customer that was touched by the feature will be impacted. Impact can be classified into a few levels like "low", "medium" and "high". You could also add couple more levels like "very low" and "very high". Making the number of levels large may not be of much help.
After the levels are fixed, we have to assign scales to the levels. Eg: Low is 0.5, a medium is 1 and a high is 2.
Impact levels and the scales are subjective. But the subjectivity is blunted in the overall RICE-scoring.
Confidence (C)
Shows how confident are you with R, I and E estimates.
Confidence is measured in percentage. To simplify things, confidence can be converted into levels like "high", "medium" and "low" and a percentage can be assigned to each level.
Effort (E)
The amount of time product, design, engineering, and testing teams will have to spend to launch the feature.
This can be measured in person days or months depending on the size of the team.
Formula
Here is the formula for RICE framework.
RICE Score = (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort
From the formula we can see that high effort features should have potentially high reach and impact to get a high score.
The features that have the highest RICE score should be implemented first.
