This is one of these exciting weeks in the life of a Product Manager! A new quarter, a new roadmap backlog and ...a whole load of responsibility. Prioritisation is the bread and butter of product teams. Thankfully, others have been there and shared with us frameworks that help prioritising the right problems to focus. Today's post is about RICE scoring, things that I like about it and other thoughts.
RICE scoring is a prioritisation framework co-developed by Sean McBride when he was a PM in Intercom. RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort.
How many users will be impacted by this feature (in X period of time)?
To begin with, we look at the number of users impacted by a feature. For instance, at Busuu I'd look at how many learners have visited our Community in the last month. This way I can tell how many learners are impacted by this feature, fix or release.
How close will this feature get you to the key result?
Impact looks at how much influence this feature will have on your objective. For example, a jacuzzi in every room of a spa-hotel will potentially have a massive impact if the hotel's objective is guests' delight.
3 = massive impact
2 = high impact
1 = medium impact
0.5 = low impact
0.25 = minimal impactHow confident are you of the scores given?
When I read about RICE scoring this is the measure some blogs describe as "gut-feeling". I remember reading that terrified me, I'm incredibly lucky to have an amazing data team to give a hand when I'm in doubt of the impact and reach. But yes, sometimes happens you lack data (screams in Spanish) and that is when this scoring comes handy.
100% = high confidence
80% = medium confidence
50% = low confidence
20% = moonshotWhat's the amount of work required (all teams involved) measured in person-weeks?
This one was a huge learning for me in the last three months: you must take into account all teams involved in a feature, fix or release e.g. product, design, marketing, developers, etc. The measure I use is "person-weeks" effort because it works at Busuu but I read sometimes it is measured in months.
This is how you calculate your RICE score: Multiply Reach, Impact, and Confidence, and divide the result by Effort.
Reach * Impact * Confidence / EffortI like RICE because it's something that you score collaboratively. I had meaningful discussions RICE scoring new features, it's essential to have different squad members involved in roadmap decissions and it helps everyone to stay focused on the objective. It's truly a magical moment: when your backlog of projects moves into the sprints timeline.
Breathe, ahhh prioritisation done! Or...is it? In the past RICE has worked wonders for me because I have worked with clear objectives. However, products evolve and become complex over time. What works today, might need to be revisited in a few months or over the next few years. There would be always new features and new ways of adapting prioritisation to your product cycles and when they'll come, I hope I can come up with a cool prioritisation framework that has a cool carb acronym. Maybe BREAD, maybe.
Want to read moar? https://www.intercom.com/blog/rice-simple-prioritization-for-product-managers/