RICE scoring
RICE scoring is a prioritisation framework from Intercom that ranks initiatives by Reach (how many users affected), Impact (per-user effect, typically scored 0.25 to 3), Confidence (certainty of the estimate, as a percentage), and Effort (engineer-months). The score is (Reach × Impact × Confidence) / Effort — a rough cost-benefit ratio that surfaces high-impact, low-effort items.
RICE's strength is structuring the conversation about prioritisation without pretending to precision it doesn't have. The scores are deliberately coarse (Impact is a small ordinal scale, Confidence is in 10-percent buckets) because finer granularity is false precision. The biggest mistake: treating RICE scores as objective. They're an inputs-explicit way to argue about priority, and the most valuable output is usually the conversation about why two people scored the same initiative differently. Alternatives: ICE (Reach absorbed into Impact, simpler), MoSCoW (categorical not numeric), Weighted Shortest Job First (SAFe). All serve the same purpose; choose the one your team will actually use.
Related terms
- Jobs-to-be-done
Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) is a product-discovery framework, popularised by Clayton Christensen, that frames features in terms of the 'job' a customer is hiring the product to do — the underlying outcome they want — rather than demographic personas or feature lists.
- OKRs
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal-setting framework, originated at Intel under Andy Grove and popularised at Google by John Doerr, that pairs qualitative Objectives (where you want to go) with measurable Key Results (how you'll know you got there).