RICE Framework: The staple of feature prioritization
In one of our previous blogs “Product Design 101: How to dissect and ideate”, we discussed how to start your journey of product mindset. The CIRCLES technique is a perfect way to structure your thoughts and create great products. However, CIRCLES does not discuss a lot about how to prioritize features.
One may think why is prioritization so important, well with more than a dozen of features in the pipeline, as a PM how do you decide which feature to take up in this sprint, how do you convince, the sales team, engineering team, support team and other stakeholders on why did you take a particular feature and not other. Not only this, the opportunity cost of developing a wrong feature in form of development cost, time lost, maintenance cost, customers lost due to the right features not being developed are very high. Therefore, prioritization becomes a pivotal part of PMing.
In the blog “PM Frameworks 101”, we discussed different frameworks for prioritization. RICE framework is one such framework that we love and is used by a lot of companies. Let us give you a recap:
Reach — How many people will this feature effect within a given time? (Scale of 1 to 10, 1 being low reach and 10 being the highest reach)
Impact — How will this impact individual users?
How much the idea will positively affect the key metric you’re trying to improve. (Scale of 1 to 10, 1 being low impact and 10 being the highest impact)
Confidence — How confident are we about the impact and reach scores? How much data do we have to back up those estimates? (Scale of 1 to 10, 1 being low confidence and 10 being the highest confidence)
Effort — How much time investment will this initiative require from product, design, and development? (Scale of 1 to 10, 1 being low effort and 10 being the highest effort)
RICE SCORE = (Reach x Impact x Confidence)/Effort
However, we have always been a bit hazy about how do you exactly calculate the confidence in a feature being successful. The process always felt arbitrary. Itamar Gilad’s blog on idea prioritization helped us understand the framework better.
The measurement of the RICE score is an evolving process straight from the concept note, to PRD, to the actual development of features quarter by quarter. As we proceed in the lifecycle of a product, the measurement of Reach, Impact, Effort, and Confidence evolves basis the improved data points collected from team discussions, user interviews, A/B testing, Dogfooding, alpha and beta releases, etc.
Let us discuss this in a bit more depth:
Reach is the measure of the adoption of a feature. It would ideally depend on how easy it is for people to find and understand the feature, and how often they need that feature. This can be ascertained using customer interviews, dogfooding, A/B testing, alpha releases, etc.
Impact can be calculated on basis of your estimation on how the feature will impact the North star metric and the users, This is generally gauged basis the customer interviews conducted and as time progresses and we moved from concept note to PRDs, and A/B testing the impact metric can be reported with even more confidence backed by user data
Effort, this measure can be relative to the range of weeks a project runs in your org with the one taking the highest number of weeks rated at 10 and the least one rated at 1. Now, basis your estimation of how much time each feature will take, rate the feature on 1 to 10.
Confidence is one part of the framework that has been very mysterious to us since the beginning. But it was after reading Itamar Gilad’s blog on this framework, that we gained some confidence (pun intended). According to the blog, confidence can only be quantified using supporting evidence. Based on the evidence collected, calculate the confidence using the confidence meter.
Source: https://itamargilad.com/the-tool-that-will-help-you-choose-better-product-ideas/
