TL;DR

RICE Score = Reach x Impact x Confidence x Ease.

Overview

One of the hardest problems in growth is figuring out what to work on next. Most teams have a backlog of ideas that looks something like this:

How do you prioritize? RICE is one framework teams use.

Ultimately, it boils down to opportunity cost. If you run one experiment, it means you won’t be able to run another, so picking the best next experiment matters a lot.

Quick definitions

Reach: how many people does this touch?
Impact: if this works, how big is the impact?
Confidence: how likely is this to succeed?
Ease: how much work will it take to run?

How it’s used

In a growth meeting, you’ll discuss as a team how to score each backlog experiment. Each category gets a score from 1-10. 1 is bad, 10 is good.

Is the final score totally scientific? No. But in the process of fleshing everything out, you’ll often realize that one experiment is order-of-magnitude better than another.

(By the way, it’s very easy for backlogs to get long. You can have a lot of ideas. We find it saves time to just use your gut to pick your 3 to 5 favorite ideas if the backlog is long, then score those. You’ll build your intuition the more you score ideas.)

Here’s more detail on RICE.