RICE Score Model

Simple method that helps to identify reach, impact, confidence and effort

Pavel avatar
Written by Pavel
Updated over a week ago

Product managers need special methods and techniques for determining priorities and getting great business results. There are dozens of popular methodologies, RICE score model is one of the most simple and convenient models for product manager’s needs.

The RICE model is an acronym including 4 components: 

  • Reach

  • Impact

  • Confidence

  • Effort

To get a RICE score you need to combine these factors.

Reach

Reach is measured in a number of people/events per time period. This factor is aimed to estimate how many people each feature or project will affect within a specific time period and how many customers will see the changes.

Pay attention to real measurements from product metrics instead of using unclear numbers.

Impact

Impact reflects what contribution does the feature give to the product.

Value is understood in different ways in each product. For example, for Hygger (B2B SaaS product) for current quarter, features get high Value if they:

  1. Improve the trial-to-paid conversion (metrics movers)

  2. Help to attract new users (Aha-moment)

  3. Help to keep current users

  4. Add values to the product and separate us from competitors

Impact is difficult to measure precisely. So, we choose from a multiple-choice scale: 3 for “massive impact”, 2 for “high”, 1 for “medium”, 0.5 for “low”, and finally 0.25 for “minimal”. These numbers get multiplied into the final score to scale it up or down.

Confidence

If you think a project could have a huge impact but don’t have data to back it up, confidence lets you control that.

Confidence can be measured with a percentage scale.

Effort 

Estimate the total amount of time a feature will require from all team members to move quickly and have an impact with the least amount of effort. 

Effort is estimated as a number of “person-months”, weeks or hours, depending on needs. It is the work that one team member can do in a specific month. Unlike the other positive factors, more effort is a bad thing, so it divides the total impact.

RICE scoring in Hygger

You can find a RICE prioritization framework in Hygger.io. 

The first thing you should do is collect all the ideas and product features on a Kanban-alike board. With Hygger, you can structure them using horizontal Swimlanes and Labels. You can also adjust the process of working with features using Columns. For example, you can create the following workflow: Backlog, Next Up, Specification, Development, and Done.

The platform offers to choose RICE score model among the scoring types.

How to use it?

So at first you should evaluate every feature with Reach, Impact, Confidence and Efforts and get the score.

You can also view all features in the table. 

So you sort features by score, get some winners from the top and send them to Development with Push option:

If you want to find out more about the method with clear examples, feel free to read our article about RICE scoring or dive into the other powerful prioritization methods such as Weighted Scoring or ICE score model.
Feel free to watch a short video tutorial "How to manage Product Backlog".

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