RICE Scores

How to use RICE scores to prioritize your product roadmap

Jordan Duff avatar
Written by Jordan Duff
Updated over a week ago

Overview

RICE is a numeric score that is calculated: (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort. The RICE system was developed by the team at Intercom. They define each of these four elements as follows:

  • Reach: how many people will this impact within a defined time period.

  • Impact: how much will this impact each person reached? (Massive = 3x, High = 2x, Medium = 1x, Low = 0.5x, Minimal = 0.25x.)

  • Confidence: how confident are you in your estimates? (High = 100%, Medium = 80%, Low = 50%.)

  • Effort: how many “person-months” will this take? (in GLIDR we let you define how you measure effort)

When to Use RICE:
RICE is gaining popularity over ICE because it differentiates between impact and reach, whereas in the ICE model, both concepts get mushed together. So use RICE scoring when your team wants to differentiate between a feature that might have a big impact for a small audience vs. a small impact for a big audience.

The Intercom team made a spreadsheet template publicly available. We wanted to take the next step and bake scoring systems right into your product management software so that your scoring and roadmap are fully integrated.

RICE is also in use by the growth product teams at Airbnb. We chatted with Pratik Shah, who told us, "As Airbnb has rapidly scaled up over the past few years, the number of product teams, product ideas, and sources of product data has ballooned. Specifically, in the growth product teams at Airbnb, we use the RICE scoring system to help us create a common, quantitative, relatively objective baseline. This has resulted in better roadmap prioritization and more effective use of our time."

How it works in GLIDR

Once you've set up Product Scoring, you can assign scores to your Ideas either from within an Idea card, or in-line in List View. Using the guidelines above, you can enter the values in each of the fields and GLIDR will calculate your RICE score. Updating any of the fields will automatically change your score.

NOTE: The Effort value is unlimited, so you don't need to stick to a scale of 1-5, although the higher the score, the higher your RICE score will be.

You can filter by Product Score while in List View, by selecting the RICE filter and choosing the range of scores you'd like to see. For example, using this to move low scoring Ideas to the Backlog, and prioritizing your higher scoring Ideas further up your Roadmap.

Setting up Prioritization Scoring

Starter tier:
To set up your scoring options, navigate to Account Menu > Team Settings > then Product Ideas. At the bottom of the page, you'll be able to turn RICE scoring on and off, along with the other scoring options. Note: only Admins and Owners can enable Prioritization Scoring.

Team, Business, Enterprise tiers:
To set up your scoring options, navigate to Project Settings > Settings > then Product Ideas. At the bottom of the page, you'll be able to turn RICE scoring on and off, along with the other scoring options. Note: only Admins and Owners can enable Prioritization Scoring.



You can customize the Reach value name to suit your needs; for example, active users per month or transactions per day. You can also customize the Effort value name, depending on the method you use, such as Low = 1, High = 5

Once you've enabled ICE scoring, you'll find it in your Idea cards and in List View.

Click here to find out more about other scoring methods available in GLIDR. Read our blog post on using RICE and other quantitative scoring methods for prioritizing your product roadmap.

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