RICE Scoring Model

 

What is the RICE Scoring Model for Prioritization?

The RICE scoring model is a prioritization framework designed to help product managers determine which products, features, and other initiatives to put on their roadmaps by scoring these items according to four factors. These factors, which form the acronym RICE, are reach, impact, confidence, and effort.

Using a scoring model such as RICE can offer product teams a three-fold benefit. First, it can enable product managers to make better-informed decisions, minimize personal biases in decision making, and help them defend their priorities to other stakeholders such as the executive staff.

We’ve broken down the framework in this short video below.

What’s the History of the RICE Scoring Model?

Messaging-software maker Intercom developed the RICE roadmap prioritization model to improve its own internal decision-making processes.

Although the company’s product team knew about and had used the many other prioritization models for product managers, they struggled to find a method that worked for Intercom’s unique set of competing project ideas.

To address this challenge, the team developed its own scoring model based on four factors (reach, impact, confidence, and effort) and a formula for quantifying and combining them. This formula would then output a single score that could be applied consistently across even the most disparate types of ideas, giving the team an objective way to determine which initiatives to prioritize on their product roadmap.

How Does the RICE Scoring Model Work?

To use the RICE scoring model, you evaluate each of your competing ideas (new products, product extensions, features, etc.) by scoring them according to the following formula: 

Reach

The first factor in determining your RICE score is to get a sense of how many people you estimate your initiative will reach in a given timeframe.

You have to decide both what “reach” means in this context and the timeframe over which you want to measure it. You can choose any time period—one month, a quarter, etc.—and you can decide that reach will refer to the number of customer transactions, free-trial signups, or how many existing users try your new feature.

Your reach score will be the number you’ve estimated. For example, if you expect your project will lead to 150 new customers within the next quarter, your reach score is 150. On the other hand, if you estimate your project will deliver 1,200 new prospects to your trial-download page within the next month, and that 30% of those prospects will sign up, your reach score is 360.

Impact

Impact can reflect a quantitative goal, such as how many new conversions for your project will result in when users encounter it, or a more qualitative objective such as increasing customer delight.

Even when using a quantitative metric (“How many people who see this feature will buy the product?”), measuring impact will be difficult, because you won’t necessarily be able to isolate your new project as the primary reason (or even a reason at all) for why your users take action. If measuring the impact of a project after you’ve collected the data will be difficult, you can assume that estimating it beforehand will also be a challenge.

Intercom developed a five-tiered scoring system for estimating a project’s impact:

• 3 = massive impact
• 2 = high impact
• 1 = medium impact
• .5 = low impact
• .25 = minimal impact

Confidence

The confidence component of your RICE score helps you control for projects in which your team has data to support one factor of your score but is relying more on intuition for another factor.

For example, if you have data backing up your reach estimate but your impact score represents more of a gut feeling or anecdotal evidence, your confidence score will help account for this.

As it did with impact, Intercom created a tiered set of discrete percentages to score confidence, so that its teams wouldn’t get stuck here trying to decide on an exact percentage number between 1 and 100. When determining your confidence score for a given project, your options are:

• 100% = high confidence
• 80% = medium confidence
• 50% = low confidence

If you arrive at a confidence score below 50%, consider it a “moonshot” and assume your priorities need to be elsewhere.

Effort

We have discussed alll of the factors to this point—reach, impact, confidence—represent the numerators in the RICE scoring equation. Effort represents the denominator.

In other words, if you think of RICE as a cost-benefit analysis, the other three components are all potential benefits while effort is the single score that represents the costs.

Quantifying effort in this model is similar to scoring reach. You simply estimate the total number of resources (product, design, engineering, testing, etc.) needed to complete the initiative over a given period of time—typically “person-months”—and that is your score.

In other words, if you estimate a project will take a total of three person-months, your effort score will be 3. (Intercom scores anything less than a month as a .5.)

https://bitly.ws/3gEjd

Setting goals and delivering value

 

Although positive, productive relationships will be your lifeblood as a new manager, you also need to get tactical. Follow these tips to ensure that you start making a difference as soon as possible after you start working as a manager:

1. Gather all the information you need. (Weeks 1–3)

How will you know what to focus on if you don’t understand the expectations, needs and goals of your supervisor, team, peers, customers and other key stakeholders? You won’t. And the consequences could be disastrous.

This is why you absolutely must get input. Immediately start scheduling informational meetings with key stakeholders. Prepare a list of good questions that will yield fertile ideas. And get ready to listen and observe like crazy. For more details on how to conduct these kinds of informational interviews, see No. 8 in our article How to ace your first week.

2. Zero in on your priorities. (Weeks 2-4)

Once you have a lay of the land — and have started building a solid reputation thanks to a few quick wins — it’s time to think carefully about what to focus on first in your new job.

Most experts recommend that you choose only three to five basic priorities. There might be a whole laundry list of items you’d like to work on, but you need to be disciplined and pick your battles. You’ll be a lot more likely to win them.

A good way to really focus is to ask yourself questions that get to the heart of the matter, such as:

• What will be most helpful to my manager, my team and my company?
• When my team and I look back on things a year from now, what do we want to be able to say we accomplished?
• What absolutely needs to happen for this team to move forward? 

Some priorities might come directly from your boss. Others might bubble up from conversations with your team or customers (make sure you always give credit where credit is due). Others may be ideas of yours that you’ve verified to be on-target during the information-gathering stage.

Examples of priorities to set during your first 90 days:

• Review and optimize all fundamental team processes.
• Meet or exceed the sales goals my supervisor expects.
• Break down communication barriers between our team and the customer success team.
• Improve my team’s morale.
• Remain one of the top-10 websites for technology news.

Tip: Try to also include some priorities that are centered on the human side of your work (e.g., Help team members create and reach long-term professional goals)and stability (e.g., Maintain the team’s status as a customer service leader).

Experienced manager Grayson Morris explains how he brought order to the chaos of a new role by focusing efforts on his top three goals.

Startup leader Jit Bhattacharya describes how his team’s planning process went from excruciating to effective.

3. Create SMART goals.

Once you’ve decided on some priorities, it’s time to get real — and real specific — about how to bring those priorities to life. In other words, you need to break them down into goals.

Stay away from lofty, vague goals. They’re tough to track, never mind reach. Make sure you create goals based on the SMART model. That means they should be:

• Specific: What exactly do you want to accomplish, in what time frame and with whom?
• Measurable: What milestones can you set to track your progress?
• Attainable: Can you really do it? Really really?
• Relevant: What matters most to you, your team and the company? Why mess around with anything else?
• Time-bound: How much time do you need to achieve the goal? How long did it take you or others to achieve something similar?

Example of a not-so-SMART goal: Eliminate long customer service calls.

Example of a SMART goal: By April 30, keep the team’s average number of customer service calls that exceed five minutes to fewer than 15 per day.

Tip: Don’t think about goals in isolation (i.e., as individual tasks to tick off one-by-one). This linear approach doesn’t reflect reality. Instead, think about how your goals interrelate. For example, let’s say you want to see stronger individual performance from your team members. That goal could also be driven by one around communicating better internally or designing more effective incentives. Make progress on one, and you’ll likely make progress on them all. And keep in mind that sometimes goals won’t advance one another; instead they could detract from one another.

Once you determine how your goals are connected, it will likely become more clear which ones are the most important, and how you can best allocate resources and time.

4. Communicate your priorities and goals. Until you sound like a broken record. (Weeks 4-12).

How you communicate your priorities and goals is just as important as which ones you choose. If you fail on this front, you simply won’t get any traction, and a few months down the road, your plan will be a distant, foggy memory.

Some experts have conducted research indicating that ideas aren’t internalized until they’ve been communicated 22 times. That’s a lot. Clearly, talking about or emailing your priorities and goals once just isn’t going to cut it!

You need to think about both how to relay your message, and the best media to use in doing it. And then you need to do it again. And again. And again. Think about this question whenever you tell or write to people about your intentions: What’s in it for them? The best way to get people to pay attention is to answer that question and address it immediately.

You should also consider the different forms of communication at your disposal. Do you want to give a presentation? Hammer home your priorities during one-on-one and group meetings? Use thank-you and update emails? Leverage your company’s intranet?

5. Enact your plan and measure progress. (Weeks 5-12)

Your priorities and goals won’t be perfect. That’s OK. If they are 80 percent of the way there, it’s time to run with what you’ve got. Break each SMART goal down into action items. Start delegating. And track your results. Every mini-goal reached along the way (or missed) is an opportunity to communicate your message, thank or course-correct your team, and ensure your legacy as a great manager.

For a full list of activities that we recommend you complete during your first 90 days, see our New manager to-do list.

https://www.franklincovey.com/

ICE Framework: The original prioritisation framework for marketers

 

Image source

by Stuart Brameld

Introducing the ICE framework

The ICE framework is the original scoring mechanism for growth marketing teams. It is widely considered to have been invented by Sean Ellis, considered by many to be one of the leaders in the growth hacking movement and now the CEO of GrowthHackers.com.

As a result, the ICE framework is probably the dominant scoring framework used by growth teams today.

What is a prioritisation framework?

A prioritisation framework, or growth strategy framework, is used by product teams, growth teams and marketing teams to prioritise work and to assist with decision making.

Using these frameworks ideas from marketing teams, product teams, stakeholders, partners and consultants are assigned a quantitative score to determine the order in which work should be done.

There are a number of prioritisation frameworks, or scoring frameworks, all centred around the same theme. These include:

Framework	Developed by	Scoring factors
RICE	Sean McBride at Intercom	Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort
ICE	Sean Ellis at GrowthHackers	Impact, Confidence, Effort
PIE	Chris Goward at WiderFunnel	Potential, Importance, Ease
HiPPO	n/a	Highest paid person’s opinion
BRASS	David Arnoux at Growth Tribe	Blink, Relevance, Availability, Scalability, Score
HIPE	Jeff Chang at Pinterest	Hypothesis, Investment, Precedent, Experience
DICET	Jeff Mignon at Pentalog	Dollars (or revenue) generated, Impact, Confidence, Ease, Time-to-money
PXL	Peep Laja at CXL	Above the fold, noticeable within 5 sec, high traffic pages, ease of implemention and more.

Prioritisation frameworks for growth

What does ICE stand for?

ICE is an acronym for 3 factors that make up an ICE score, these are:

• I – Impact
• C- Confidence
• E – Effort

Factor	Description
Impact	How impactful do I expect this test to be? Consider any relevant metrics and past data to calculate the likely impact on your baseline metric.
Confidence	How sure am I that this test will prove my hypothesis? Use data and past experience to assign a confidence score.
Ease	How easily can I get launch this test? As a marketer, if an idea needs no development work and you can complete it on your own, give it a higher score.

How do you calculate an ICE score?

Firstly, a score of between 1 and 10 is assigned to each individual factor (Impact, Confidence and Ease) and then all 3 scores are multiplied together to provide an overall score of between 3 and 30.

The biggest advantage of ICE prioritisation is its simplicity, decisions can be made very quickly, particularly where ‘good enough’ is the goal. That said, the main criticism is the subjectivity within the scoring, particularly for newer growth teams where there may be little or no historic data with which to accurately determine potential impact or confidence in an idea.

ICE framework template

The image below shows a set of ideas scored based on Impact, Confidence and Ease. The ideas with the highest score rise to the top of the list (or backlog) thereby creating a prioritised to-do list for the growth team.

Image source

Why use the ICE framework?

As with any prioritisation framework, the scores themselves are largely meaningless. The goal of using ICE prioritisation is to:

1. Assess the idea in a thoughtful, structured and unbiased way
2. Provide the ability to easily compare the ideas against others

Further resources

https://bitly.ws/3e4Wn

ICE Scoring Model

The ICE Scoring Model is a relatively quick way to assign a numerical value to different potential projects or ideas to prioritize them based on their relative value, using three parameters: Impact, Confidence, and Ease.

What is the ICE Scoring Model?

ICE Scoring is one of the many prioritization strategies available for choosing the right/next features for a product. The ICE Scoring Model helps prioritize features and ideas by multiplying three numerical values assigned to each project: Impact, Confidence and Ease. Each item being evaluated gets a ranking from one to ten for each of the three values, those three numbers are multiplied, and the product is that item’s ICE Score.

Impact looks at how much the project will move the needle on the key metric being targeted. Confidence is the certainty that the project will actually have the predicted Impact. Ease looks at the level of effort to complete the project.

For example, Item One has an Impact of seven, a Confidence of six, and an Ease of five, while Item Two has an Impact of nine, a Confidence of seven and an Ease of two. The ICE Scores would be 210 for Item One and 126.

Those scores can then be compared with a glance and the item with the highest score gets the top slot in the prioritization hierarchy (which would be Item One in our example). Item Two’s relatively low Ease value dragged that item’s ICE score way down, despite the fact it would have a greater Impact at a higher level of Confidence than Item One. This is because all three elements of the equation are treated equally, unlike a weighted scoring model.

Why is ICE Scoring Useful and Who Created it?

There are many different scoring models out there, but ICE primarily separates itself from the pack by being simpler and easier than most of the alternatives. Because ICE only requires three inputs (Impact, Confidence, and Ease) for each idea under consideration, teams can rapidly calculate the ICE score for everything and make prioritization decisions accordingly.

It’s an even simpler calculation than the RICE model, which adds Reach as a fourth element in the equation (it also swaps Ease for Effort, so it uses Reach * Impact * Confidence / Effort for the formula).

The fact that ICE is so speedy is in no small part due to the person who created it, Sean Ellis. Ellis is most famous for coining the term “growth hacking” and helping companies quickly ramp up experimentation. Growth hacking experiments are supposed to be quick and iterative, so it makes sense that the scoring model used to determine which experiments to prioritize would also be quick and easy to use.

ICE scoring is basically a “good enough” estimation and far less rigorous than other scoring models that product teams typically rely upon. There is also a high level of variability in any item’s ICE Score based on who’s doing the scoring. Since it’s almost completely subjective, two people could assign very different values to the attributes of different ideas and end up with contrasting opinions.

The fact that a low Ease score can so easily drag down an item’s ICE score also highlights the “experimental” origin of the model; in the land of growth hacking “failing fast” is extremely valuable due to the lessons learned, and teams typically don’t want to invest a ton of time in any single project. However, some things that will have a bigger impact require a larger resource and time commitment. Solely relying on ICE scores could lead a team to keep going for “low hanging fruit” instead of making a larger investment in a project that could make a much bigger difference in the long run.

ICE Scoring is best used for relative prioritization; if you are considering a few contenders, it’s a great way to pick a winner. Similarly, if you were to apply it to the entire backlog it will help bubble up a top tier of options for the goal being targeted at that moment.

A major drawback of ICE Scoring is that relatively few people in an organization will have enough information to accurately predict all three elements of the equation. Impact and Confidence are business considerations while Ease falls into the technical domain.

Engaging product development to provide an Ease ranking for every item being considered in a scoring exercise is one way to limit the subjectivity to areas where the scorers should have a stronger body of knowledge and gets decision-makers out of the business of guesstimating development timelines. However, the fast and cheap nature of ICE Scoring may run counter to asking developers to create a level of effort for dozens or hundreds of possible projects.

It’s also important to have a consistent definition of the 1-10 scale for ranking each of the ICE elements. If there isn’t an agreement on what a confidence of “7” means it could lead to some very inconsistent assessments by various team members.

While ICE Scoring definitely has its merits, it’s likely not the best method for prioritizing an entire product roadmap, but is better suited for pre-work or taking advantage of a particular opportunity.

Conclusion

Speed and simplicity are ICE Scoring’s biggest selling points and can help product teams narrow things down. Its strength is also one of its weaknesses, however, since it is only assessing an item’s impact relative to a single goal—in an organization with multiple, concurrent goals it falls short of other scoring models’ capabilities.

Despite its lack of nuance and complexity, ICE Scoring can offer a slick way to trim things down and provide some relative comparison points for decision-makers. And when you’re trying to reach a consensus, sometimes ruling things out is just as helpful as figuring out which item is the cream of the crop.

To learn more about prioritization, watch the following webinar.

https://www.productplan.com/

7 Strategies to Choose the Best Features for Your Product

 

How to prioritize features is always a hot topic for product teams. Even the most seasoned product manager struggles with determining which features and initiatives to put on the roadmap and what prioritization frameworks to employ. With so many opportunities competing for scarce resources, how do you decide?

In this post, I will cover seven popular strategies and prioritization frameworks for prioritizing features.

7 Popular Strategies and Prioritization Frameworks:

1. Value versus Complexity Quadrant
2. Weighted Scoring
3. Kano Model
4. Buy a Feature
5. Opportunity Scoring
6. Affinity Grouping
7. Story Mapping

Whether you’re developing a new product or maintaining an existing product here are seven different prioritization frameworks you can use to prioritize product features. In the end, the technique you choose isn’t as important as the conversation your team has about the priorities. And even if you disagree about the specific prioritization, if you can get agreement on the criteria, you’re ahead of the game.

1. Value versus Complexity Quadrant

In the Value versus Complexity model, you evaluate every opportunity based on its business value and its relative complexity to implement. Based on our conversations with product managers this is a common approach, and many product managers go through this assessment instinctively every day. The prioritization framework of the matrix is simple: The initiatives that have the highest value and the lowest effort will be the low-hanging fruit for your roadmap.

2. Weighted scoring

With weighted scoring, you can use the Value versus Complexity model, but layer in scoring to arrive at an objective result. Based on dozens of interviews with product managers we arrived at this model for our prioritization model in ProductPlan.

By using a scoring method to rank your strategic initiatives and major features, product managers can facilitate a more productive discussion about what to include on the product roadmap. While there are many inputs that ultimately go into a product decision, a scoring model can help the team have an objective conversation.

A clear, objective scoring model can inform the initiatives you decide to include on your roadmap, and lend credibility to your product strategy. In ProductPlan, you can seamlessly drag approved initiatives from the Planning Board onto your roadmap.

3. Kano Model (customer delight versus product function)

With the Kano model product managers can look at potential features through the lens of the delight a feature provides customers versus the potential investment you make to improve the feature.

There are some basic features that your product simply needs to have in order for you to sell your product in the market. You need to have these “threshold” features, but continuing to invest in them won’t improve customer delight dramatically.

There are some features (like performance) that give you a proportionate increase in customer satisfaction as you invest in them.

Finally, there are some excitement features that you can invest in that will yield a disproportionate increase in customer delight. If you don’t have these features, customers might not even miss them; but if you include them, and continue to invest in them you will create dramatic customer delight.

4. Buy a Feature

Buy-a-feature prioritization is an activity you can use with customers or stakeholders to prioritize a set of potential features. The approach is simple but fun. List potential features and assign a “price” to each (based on a relative cost to develop it). Hand out a set amount of cash and then ask participants to buy the features. Some will place all their money on one particular feature they’re passionate about, while others might spread their cash around the room. The result is your prioritized feature list.

5. Opportunity Scoring

Opportunity scoring is a type of Gap Analysis that comes from Outcome-Driven Innovation. Without getting too detailed, the idea is to measure and rank opportunities based on their importance versus customer satisfaction. To conduct opportunity scoring you ask customers to score the importance of each feature and then also score how satisfied they are currently with that feature. Your opportunities are those features that are highly important yet customers gave a low satisfaction score.

6. Affinity Grouping

Affinity grouping can be a fun prioritization framework activity. I’ve conducted affinity grouping sessions with product teams that are trying to understand what to build. The idea is simple: have everyone brainstorm opportunities on sticky notes. Then as a team, begin to group similar items together, and then name the groups. Finally, everyone on the team begins to vote on or rank the groups.

7. Story Mapping

Story mapping is a personal favorite of mine to prioritize features. It’s used in agile organizations. And is a great way to document the Minimum Viable Product by organizing and prioritizing user stories and the development releases.  The idea, in a nutshell, is you can map out the workflow of your product from beginning to end.

Here’s how it works:

1. You create the workflow using cards or a Kanban board, and you arrange the cards in order from the start of the customer experience to the end of the customer experience.
2. Then, you then order the most important things to develop from top to bottom.
3. Finally, you create slices of releases based on that prioritization.

Image Source: ProductPlan

Strategies for Prioritizing Features

Your good product management skills will come into play during the process. I have a few suggestions regardless of the prioritization framework you choose:

• Approach prioritization as a team activity; not only is does it create buy-in on the team, you get different perspectives. It’s also a lot more fun.
• Limit the number of items you are prioritizing – focus on the biggest items rather than the details.
• Categorize and group initiatives together into strategic themes (for example, “improving satisfaction” for a particular persona would be a good way to group).
• Before you begin prioritizing, it’s helpful if you understand the customer value of each initiative. The customer value should be rooted in evidence that you’ve gathered from customers rather than your opinions.
• Before you begin, have a rough estimate of the cost. Even the T-shirt sizing of “small” “medium” and “large” will be helpful during the process.

Product management can often be a difficult balancing act, in which you find yourself constantly trying to satisfy many competing agendas for your product. Your sales team wants a new set of features. Your executives want the product market-ready by a certain date. Development wants to push a few items off until the next release. The investors want to shave costs wherever possible. You want to make sure your product doesn’t fall behind the competition. And your customers want everything.

And because it can be so difficult to know exactly what to prioritize amid all of this noise, product managers can easily fall into several pitfalls — and prioritize the wrong things for their products.

Strategies to Avoid Common Prioritization Pitfalls

• Don’t prioritize based on what your competitors are doing.  Your product’s development should be based on the research, your customer feedback, and innovative ideas that you and your team compile — not on what another product is doing.
• Don’t prioritize based on requests from your sales team. Your sales team will always have a feature-request opinion. But relying on their opinion is the fastest way to lose direction for the product’s strategic purpose.
• Don’t prioritize by what’s easy. Even if your developers tell you that they can get a lot of items checked off of the list quickly. It might sound like a viable option but this isn’t a product strategy. In fact, doing so is a strong indication that you’re not working toward an objective for your product.
• Don’t prioritize based on your gut instinct alone. Driving a product to a successful market launch demands hard evidence and a prioritization framework to support the product manager’s decisions. Think industry research, user surveys, conversations with customers, feedback from the company’s sales or support teams.

https://www.productplan.com/