What does RICE stand for?

Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. The score is calculated as (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort.

How do I estimate Reach?

Reach is the number of people or events the project will affect within a fixed time window — for example, customers per quarter, transactions per month, or active users per week. Use real numbers from analytics whenever possible.

What is the Confidence score for?

Confidence is a discount factor that captures how much trust you have in your Reach and Impact estimates. It prevents speculative projects with weak evidence from outranking better-validated ones.

How is RICE different from ICE?

ICE drops the Reach component, leaving Impact, Confidence, and Effort. RICE is more rigorous when project audiences vary in size; ICE is faster for early-stage triage.

When should I not use RICE?

Avoid RICE for strategic bets where the upside is hard to quantify, for compliance or quality work where the project must happen regardless of score, or when most of the inputs are pure guesses.

RICE Prioritization

Definition

RICE is an acronym for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. It provides a quantitative way to compare different projects or features based on their potential value versus the cost of implementation.

Origin

Developed by the product team at Intercom to improve their internal decision-making process.

The Formula

Score = (Reach × Impact × Confidence) / Effort

Reach: How many people will this affect? (per time period).
Impact: How much will this contribute to our goal? (Massive = 3x, High = 2x, Medium = 1x, Low = 0.5x, Minimal = 0.25x).
Confidence: How sure are we about these estimates? (High = 100%, Medium = 80%, Low = 50%).
Effort: How much time will it take? (Person-months).

RICE Prioritization

Definition

Origin

The Formula

Related Frameworks

Jobs to be Done (JTBD)

Lean Canvas

Porter’s Five Forces