RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers

When building a product, brainstorming ideas, finding ways for improvement, and collecting feedback can result in many good ideas.

However, it can be challenging to prioritise the order in which you tackle those ideas for several reasons:

• It's more satisfying to work on pet ideas you'd use yourself instead of projects with a broad reach.
• It's tempting to focus on clever ideas instead of those that impact your goals.
• New ideas are more exciting than ideas you're confident about.

The RICE tool allows you to usefully compare different ideas in a consistent way.

RICE consists of four factors:

• Reach: How many people will each project impact? —E.g. customers per quarter or transactions per month.
• Impact: Estimate the impact on a person - high (2x), medium (1x) or low. (x0.5) ( E.g. how much will this project increase adoption?
• Confidence: How confident are you in your estimates. Use a scale of high confidence (100%), medium (80%), or low confidence (50%)
• Effort: Estimate how many "person-months" a project will require from all team members involved.