A Case for the RICEF Score
If lean product development has one credo, it is to produce user value with as much of our activity as possible. I argue that while the focus on value is a good principle to work in a meaningful way, zeroing in on what our individual users get out of our work for themselves might lead us to build unsustainable products and companies. That is why I am proposing the principle of Sustainable Value, and a Sustainable Value Index to help quantify it based on estimations.
When talking about user value, this typically means the value individual users would ascribe to what our product has to offer them. In user research, we dive into the individual user experience, and when building prototypes and testing them, creating the best version of this experience is usually the target.
While working out the idea of the user value we aim to create, we also look at the costs in terms of development effort. After all, not every piece of value-adding software code is created equal. Some features may be way harder and more time-consuming to create than others. It might therefore make sense to prioritize work based on where to get the most value out of the accrued costs. This approach is formalized for example in the RICE Score, where the benefits reach, impact, and confidence are divided by the effort for each item to be prioritized. This yields a single number that makes a list of many items comparable for prioritization.
What is missing when we look at individual use is the contextual impact this use can have on the environment and society. For example, a large SUV in individual ownership certainly makes for a nice driving experience when used, but it has considerable negative impacts on the environment and society attached to it.
Looking at sustainability, we should then not just take direct costs of creating the item into account, but add the environmental and social footprint on the side of the denominator. A scale needs to be chosen that is at least normalized to the cost (or exceeding it), where a maximum acceptable footprint should have at least the same effect on the score as the maximum acceptable direct cost. The resulting formula yields a RICEF score.
It should be noted here that none of the elements of the RICE formula are exactly determined when the prioritization is happening. Instead, team members and stakeholders draw from their collective decades of experience when they hone in on the numbers to enter into the formula in discussions. When considering the social and environmental footprint of an item, team members and stakeholders usually do not have this experience to work with. The knowledge, especially for the environmental aspects, is hard to obtain, and for the most part is not available within product development teams. For this reason, outside expertise is usually sought, which comes in the form of agencies which conduct life cycle analyses (LCAs) of the products in question. This process is based on science and aims to be as exact as possible, but the analyses often take time and are expensive.
To bring the topic of sustainability into teams, and thereby make it a core element of product development, team members need to gain expertise in the footprint of their choices in materials, but also designs, code, and technological architectures. As a first step, they should aim for a knowledge level sufficient to estimate comparatively, i.e. assess the relative footprint of an item when compared to another. This would allow for a method like RICEF, and it would at least favor activities in prioritization which are relatively better with regard to their footprint.
