RICE backlog prioritiser
Score each initiative on reach, impact, confidence and effort. The tool ranks them, so the conversation moves from whose item comes first to which assumption you disagree about.
Your initiatives
| Initiative | Reach | Impact | Conf. % | Effort | Score | DEL |
|---|
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How to fill it in
- Reach - how many people this affects in one quarter. Real users, sessions or accounts. Not a percentage.
- Impact - how much it moves the metric for each of them, on the standard RICE scale from minimal (0.25) to massive (3).
- Confidence - how much evidence you have, as a percentage. 100% means data, 80% means informed judgement, 50% means a hunch you should be honest about.
- Effort - total person-months across everyone involved: product, design, engineering, QA. Not just the build.
Ranked backlog
Score = Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort. Higher is better. The absolute number means nothing on its own - only the ordering matters.
Using RICE without fooling yourself
RICE is a conversation tool, not an oracle. Its value is that it separates four judgements people usually make as one blurred instinct - and it makes the weakest of those judgements visible.
Confidence is the honest field. Most inflated scores come from a 90% confidence on a number somebody made up. If you can't say where a reach estimate came from, put it at 50% and watch what happens to the ranking. That drop is information.
Effort should include everyone. Counting only engineering days is the most common way RICE goes wrong. Design, product, QA, compliance review and release work are all effort, and features differ wildly in how much of that they carry.
Re-score, don't defend. When someone disagrees with the ranking, ask which of the four numbers they'd change and why. Nine times out of ten they'll name one - and then you're arguing about an assumption you can go and test, instead of about priorities in the abstract.
Don't ship the ranking as a plan. Sequencing still has to respect dependencies, learning order and the team's capacity. RICE tells you what's most valuable per unit of effort; it doesn't know that item four unblocks items one and seven.