🪜A practical way of implementing the RICE Framework!

Step-by-step with a template on how we do the RICE framework to prioritize our features at Qawafel!

Before, I wrote a complete detailed series of posts about Product Prioritization that had tremendous appeal and a lot have asked me to share how I practically do it as Head of Product in Qawafel, a B2B marketplace to simplify trade in MENA.

Any product manager understands that the key to product success is knowing where and what to spend your (and the company’s) limited money, time, and energy on. Eventually, it’s not about “what” to build. It’s mostly about “why” to build this. It’s about building the ‘right’ features

In this post, I’ll share the nitty-gritty of how we do product prioritization using the RIICE framework to determine what to work at.

NOTE: if you’re interested in getting a template to copy-paste and quickly use it in any of your favorite app: Notion, ClickUp, Fibery, let me know in the comments with “I want this” 🙂

Needs an update but this is the entire flow

📬 Capturing ideas

To start, every idea is captured using our 💡Idea Form using ClickUp forms that can even be shared publicly, with our customers.

PMs need to have one input door to capture all ideas from everyone, including sales, growth, CEO, support, leadership, market trends, etc.

All those captured ideas, problems or product insights from anyone goes to our 💡Idea Bank list. Those ideas are investigated and prioritized on a weekly basis by PM and APM using the RIICE framework (double ‘I’, I know. Will get to it) and a simple 📄Idea Brief to fill.

During the investigation, ideas then go to any of the below paths by changing their status

• Ready for scope: ideas that are great potential and will go further through development. Those ideas are then moved via ClickUp automation to our Product Backlog for further Roadmap planning and review.
• Revisit - good ideas but would need more insights to justify spending resources on it
• Skip - ideas that are not currently aligned with our strategy/objectives but will keep in our backlog for future analysis.

“Ready to scope” ideas will go to our 💡Product backlog (and be given an Inbox status) via ClickUp automation for further 🗺️Roadmap planning and 💬Product Review (a weekly meeting where we meet as a team and discuss ideas, designs, PRDs, etc).

What’s the difference between Idea Backlog, Product Backlog & Sprint backlog
Unlike product backlog or sprint backlog, we define idea backlog as simply a list of potential ideas that requires investigation and prioritization to earn a spot in the Product Backlog.

Then we move those ideas from our Product Backlog to Sprint Backlog when they’re well scopped and designed. Unlike the agile practice, where the scoping and design of features happen during the sprint, for us, every item that enters to our 2-week sprint is ready be worked on.

🔍Idea prioritization

As a startup, we have limited resources, and we’re going so fast. We can’t be building anything that crosses our minds (driven by emotional impulses), and we can’t ship everything (limited resources).

We need a set of criteria that we rank ideas upon and decide on which one requires our urgent attention.

After capturing each idea, each PM (along with our APM) will make sure to understand the idea, briefly describe using the 📄Idea Brief and prioritize it according to our below RIICE framework. That’s what grooming is to us.

We then undergo a weekly recurring meeting called Betting (inspired by ShapeUp from Basecamp). In this meeting, PMs pitch their top-ranked ideas.

📄Idea Brief

Here is the key info we require PMs to fill in for each idea. We then discuss its potential and the brief asynchronously via ClickUp comments.

• Idea name
• What product is this related to (dropdown for product type and product area)
• Source of this idea? (Leadership, Finance, Growth, Operation, Customer request, Market trend (competition or market ideas), Sales, Internal ideas
• Brief description of the idea
• Problem statement (aka translating the idea to a problem/need)
• Why this is important? (a detailed justification for the RIICE prioritization)
• Any screenshots, links, or video clips

RIICE Framework

PMs fill the below score with a note explaining their justification.

1)Reach

How many users are impacted by this feature every month? If this is a brand-new feature, how many users are we expecting to impact?

Explaining the scores: (I explained in this post the importance of having a clear and objective definition for the criteria you end up using)

• Tiny (0-20 users) = 1
• Small (x–x users) = 2
• Medium (x-x users) = 3
• Big (x-x users) = 4
• Huge (x-x users) = 5

The ‘x’ ranges will usually be defined according to your daily, weekly or monthly active users (a metric that is unique to each biz)

Examples:

• Project 1: 500 customers reach this point in the signup funnel each month, and 30% choose this option. The reach is 500 × 30% = 150 customers per month.
• Project 2: Every customer who uses this feature each month will see this change. The reach is 2,000 customers per month.
• Project 3: This change will have a one-time effect on 800 existing customers, with no ongoing effect. The reach is 800 customers per month.

2) Impact (Business)

How much does this impact our bottom line (align with POKTs, pending deals, moves North Start Metrics, or Leading KPIs)?

[Note: POKTs is our framework to replace OKRs. Will share a post about it near future]

PMs can pick one or multiple reasoning but will have to share their thoughts and reasoning behind it.

Explaining our scores:

• Minimal = 2
• Low = 3
• Medium = 5
• High = 8
• Massive = 10

Examples:

• We have client X with a value of $$$ that is waiting for this big feature
• This aligns with our objective XYZ
• This will heavily impact our churn rate

3) Impact (customer)

How is this impacting our users? Impact for our customers is all about how severe and frequent the problem

We use a simple map of Pain frequency vs. Intensity to help PMs easily defined customer impact.

Explaining our score:

• Massive (Shark/Daily) =5
• High (Shark/Annually) = 4
• Medium (Mosquito/Daily) = 3
• Low (Mosquito/Annually) = 2
• Very low (Mosquito/Once) = 1

Examples:

• The customer faces this problem every time he receives an order and the potential consequence is related to thousands of dollars lost. I will give it 5
• The user faces the problem once during signing up but it’s super frustrating impacting activation. Will give it 4.

4) Confidence

How confident are you with all your scores?

Since almost all prioritization is driven by pure assumptions, we need to factor in our level of confidence about our estimates. If you think a project could have a huge impact but don’t have data to back it up, confidence lets you control that. It’s not enough to pick a choice, we need to always explain the reasons behind it

Explaining our score:

• High (100%) = 5
• Medium (80) = 4
• Low (50%) = 3
• Not sure (20%) = 2
• Can’t measure (10%) = 1

Examples

• I’ve worked on a similar problem before when I was in ClickUp and it was a success, I’ll give it a 100%
• I don’t have data but I have research to support my estimates. I’ll give it 50%.
• I have data to support the reach and effort, but I’m unsure about the impact. This project gets an 80% confidence score.

5) Ease

How long this project will take?

Estimate the total amount of time a project will require from all members of your team: product, design, and engineering. This is a rough estimate that a Technical Navigator (a role we had to sync the Product team and Engineering team) will help define based on the Idea Brief

Explaining the score:

• Tiny (within a day) = 5
• Small (1-3 days) = 4
• Medium (a week) = 3
• Large (1-2w) = 2
• Extra Large (2w+) = 1

Examples:

• This will take about a week of planning, 3 days of design, and 1 week of engineering time. I’ll give it an effort score of 3.

📈Backlog analysis dashboard

We have a dashboard in ClickUp that gives us some insights and performance data on how our grooming and prioritization efforts.

We had a lot of discussion on what’s the right KPIs to measure. We don’t want to be a feature factory setting a KPI around no# of prioritized features. So we came up with an objective score to weigh in no# of prioritized features AND the quality of prioritized features:

• The ratio of no# backlog-to-shipped ideas (no# of ideas in product backlog) to the actual impact those ideas provided. This enables us to reward quality and quantify performance.
• Cumulative RIICE score

Some key tips

• Revisit Strategic Objectives. Start by taking a step back and reminding yourself of the overarching strategy outlined in the product roadmap. You don’t need to overhaul the entire roadmap every time you prepare for backlog refinement, but you do need to keep high-level objectives top of mind.
• Talk to Stakeholders. Regularly sync up with both internal (executives) and external stakeholders (customers) to get feedback. As a product person, you are a liaison between stakeholders and strategy.
• Leverage Product Reviews to get feedback and advice from your fellow product team.
• Always Support RICE with data. Don’t just share your subjective take on the scores, make sure to support your score with insights, data, research, best-practices protocols, etc.
• Most likely, you’ll need to re-prioritize the backlog based on new findings and evolving needs. It’s wise to shift around priorities before pushing them down the development steps.

Want to have a ready copy-paste template to use this framework

I’m working on having a ready-to-use template for multiple tools like Jira, Fibery, ClickUp, or Notion. But since this will take some time, I would love to know first if there’s an interest in this and then what tool.

So if you’re interested, just share a comment mentioning your interest and preferred tool for me to send it your way 🙂

Notion Template here 🤓