RICE framework

We're building a comprehensive knowledge library about product development as part of our mission. The library is for anyone looking to make better decisions — primarily decisions about how to further develop a product. Whether you're an inventor, a product manager, or a Chief Product Officer, using a structured decision-making method increases your chances of building the right things for the right audience (build the right thing for the right audience). Today we'll introduce the RICE framework.

Basic Information

Framework name: RICE.

Inventor: Sean McBride and colleagues, Intercom.

Year of first use: 2015.

Link to the author's original research: RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers.

Key figures in the framework's development:

1. Intercom employees,

2. Brian Balfour,

3. Melissa Perri,

4. John Cutler.

Key milestones in the framework's development:

1. Intercom on Product Management (e-book).

Context of First Use

RICE is a tool for refining the order in which a product manager evaluates ideas and decides how to develop them further. The framework also helps assess ideas and convince others why some ideas are better than others.

Basic Prioritization Principles

The goal of RICE is to prioritize further development across 4 parameters:

• R = reach, a numeric estimate of "how many people our feature or product will affect or use in some way within a given period."

• I = impact, a numeric value expressing the expected effect on a measurable outcome.

• C = confidence, a numeric value expressing the level of certainty in the estimated numbers (R, I, E).

• E = effort, a numeric measure of the effort required to build a given feature or product.

We score each potential new feature or product on reach, impact, confidence, and effort, then plug the values into the formula below.

The highest values represent the greatest benefit for further development (more precisely, the greatest benefit per unit of time invested). Those ideas are the winners.

Prioritization Example

How we define each value is entirely up to us. It is important to add, though, that the definitions must be the same across all features and products being evaluated, otherwise the comparison makes no sense. The values must also always be current, which can be a hard to keep it current when you have thousands of features and hundreds of products.

Reach

• Reach can be estimated as the size of the market we're trying to serve — for example, 455,000 e-book users in the Czech Republic or 15 million car-leasing subscribers in Germany.

Impact

• Impact can be scored as an actual effect expressed as a number — for example, 50,000 notifications will be positively affected. It can also be scored relatively, on a scale that expresses a hypothetical impact with a number, such as 3 or 0.5.

Confidence

• Confidence is a numeric value from 0 to 100%. Intercom recommends choosing a few fixed levels of certainty, for example 100%, 80%, or 40%, and scoring each estimate against them.

Effort

• Effort is scored as a number representing the man-days (MD) needed to deliver the entire feature or product across the team. The time unit can of course be changed. For example, 15 MD to deliver a given feature across the whole innovation team.