It is prioritisation week. The backlog has 47 items. Sales wants the CRM integration. Engineering wants to refactor the auth system. The CEO wants a mobile app. Everyone has strong opinions and nobody has data. You need a framework that makes the debate productive instead of political.
RICE — Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort — is one of the most popular prioritisation frameworks in product management. Developed by Intercom, it gives teams a structured way to score initiatives against a common formula. When used well, it surfaces hidden assumptions and makes trade-offs explicit. When used poorly, it creates false precision that shuts down critical thinking.
The Core Idea
The RICE formula is straightforward: Reach multiplied by Impact multiplied by Confidence, divided by Effort. Reach estimates how many users will be affected in a given time period. Impact scores how much each user will be affected, on a scale from minimal (0.25) to massive (3). Confidence captures how certain you are about your estimates, from 50% to 100%. Effort measures the cost in person-weeks.
The result is a single score that allows you to rank initiatives on a common scale. A feature that affects many users with high impact and high confidence at low effort scores well. A feature that affects few users with uncertain impact at high effort scores poorly. The formula is not magic — it is a structured way to make the inputs to your decision explicit.