Prioritization with RICE Method!

After exploring MoSCoW, let’s ‘taste’ another prioritization technique called the ‘RICE’ method and apply it to a Scrum team called ‘Superb’ that needs to prioritize their features for their upcoming release.

RICE Method: RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. Each of these factors is assigned a numerical value, and the scores are used to calculate an overall priority score for each feature.

Here’s how the RICE method works:

• Reach: Reach refers to the number of people who will benefit from the feature. The higher the potential user base, the higher the reach score.
• Impact: Impact measures the potential positive effect the feature will have on users or the business. Features with greater impact receive a higher impact score.
• Confidence: Confidence represents how certain you are about your estimates for reach and impact. If you have high confidence in your estimates, the feature receives a higher confidence score.
• Effort: Effort measures the time, resources, and complexity required to complete the feature or task. It quantifies how much work is needed to implement the item.

Let’s apply the RICE method to the Scrum team ‘Superb’ and two example features:

Feature 1: Enhanced User Onboarding

• Reach: This feature will affect all new users, so the reach is estimated to be 100. (on the scale of 0–100%)
• Impact: Improving the onboarding process can lead to higher user engagement and retention, which would have a significant impact on the business. The impact is estimated to be 9 (on a scale of 1 to 10).
• Confidence: The team is confident in their estimates, so the confidence level is 8 (on a scale of 1 to 10).
• Effort: Developing the enhanced onboarding might require substantial development effort and design work. The effort is estimated to be 6 (on a scale of 1 to 10).

Feature 2: Dark Mode Support

• Reach: This feature will appeal to users who prefer dark mode, but it won’t impact all users. The reach is estimated to be 40 (on the scale of 1–100%).
• Impact: Adding dark mode can improve user experience, but it might not have as significant an impact as the onboarding feature. The impact is estimated to be 6.
• Confidence: The team is quite confident in their estimates, so the confidence level is 9.
• Effort: Implementing dark mode might involve changes to the UI and codebase, but it’s not as resource-intensive as the onboarding feature. The effort is estimated to be 3.

Now, let’s calculate the RICE scores for each feature:

Feature 1 — Enhanced User Onboarding: RICE Score = (Reach * Impact * Confidence) / Effort RICE Score = (100 * 9 * 8) / 6 = 1200

Feature 2 — Dark Mode Support: RICE Score = (Reach * Impact * Confidence) / Effort RICE Score = (40 * 6 * 9) / 3 = 720

As we can see, based on the RICE scores, the ‘Enhanced User Onboarding’ feature has a higher priority than the ‘Dark Mode Support’ feature. Scrum team ‘Superb’ should prioritize the features with higher RICE scores as they represent a better balance between potential impact, reach, and effort required.