Glossary
What is RICE scoring?
A prioritisation formula that scores each candidate piece of work as Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort, so that ideas of different sizes can be compared on expected value per unit of effort.
RICE was published by Intercom's product team, who built it for their own roadmap decisions. Its useful contribution is the denominator and the discount: effort stops a big idea winning on size alone, and confidence stops an exciting guess outranking a modest certainty. Its weakness is that all four inputs are estimates, two of them (impact and confidence) pure judgement, and the output hides that behind a number.
The four factors, and a worked example
Reach is how many people or events the work affects in a fixed period — customers per quarter, sign-ups per month. Impact is how much it moves each of them, on a fixed scale: 3 for massive, 2 for high, 1 for medium, 0.5 for low, 0.25 for minimal. Confidence is a percentage that discounts the first two: 100 for high, 80 for medium, 50 for low. Effort is the total work across everyone involved, in person-months.
Take two candidates. A bulk-export feature reaches 2,000 customers a quarter, at medium impact, with 80 per cent confidence, for 4 person-months: 2,000 × 1 × 0.8 ÷ 4 = 400. A fix to the onboarding flow reaches 500 new accounts a quarter, at high impact, with 50 per cent confidence, for 1 person-month: 500 × 2 × 0.5 ÷ 1 = 500. The smaller job scores higher, and it does so on the least certain numbers in the table.
Where RICE helps
It earns its keep when a product team has many candidate bets of roughly the same kind and size, a shared definition of reach, and a habit of arguing from enthusiasm. Forcing every idea through the same four questions exposes the ones with no reach figure at all, and makes effort part of the conversation instead of an afterthought.
Used that way the score is a prompt, not a verdict. The valuable output is the disagreement about an input — why one person says 2,000 customers and another says 200 — and the ordering is a by-product.
Where RICE misleads
The arithmetic produces false precision: a score of 412 against 398 looks like a ranking and is noise. Confidence is itself a guess about the other guesses, and in practice it is the dial people turn to get the answer they already wanted. Impact has no unit, so two scorers using the same scale are not measuring the same thing.
It also ignores what decides whether work can be promised. Effort is a single total, so the score cannot see that all four person-months fall on a team with none to spare, or that the work waits on a dependency nobody has agreed. And it compares unlike work badly: a compliance deadline or a platform migration has almost no reach and still has to happen. A score orders a list; it does not say what fits. That takes each team's capacity line, and a decision about the first item past it.
Related terms
- Commitment exception — A recorded justification required to commit to work that is not yet decision-ready, naming why it is early, what is still unknown, who accepts the risk, and what condition would change the decision.
- Delivery governance — The practice of deciding what to commit to — establishing value, ownership, capacity, dependencies and open questions before people, budget or a date are promised.
- Decision-ready demand — A demand that can responsibly be committed to: the problem stated apart from the proposed solution, an intended outcome, a named owner, a first capacity figure, the dependencies, and the open questions written down as unknowns.
This definition comes from building DeliverySheet — it takes a vague work request to a clear delivery decision, so the shape, owner, capacity, dependencies and open questions are on the table before anyone commits people or a date.
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