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RICE Prioritization

The idea, in plain English

RICE is a recipe for turning a gut feeling of 'this feels important' into a number you can rank. It stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. Imagine choosing which home repair to do first: you weigh how many people it helps (Reach), how much it helps each one (Impact), how sure you are (Confidence), and how much work it is (Effort). RICE multiplies the three good things and divides by the effort, so cheap ideas that help many people rise to the top.

How it works

  1. 1Estimate Reach: how many people this affects in a period, like users per month.
  2. 2Estimate Impact (how much it moves the needle each) and Confidence (0 to 1, how sure you are of your guesses).
  3. 3Estimate Effort: how much work it takes, often in person-weeks.
  4. 4Score = (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort. Sort features by score; the highest is what you build first.

When you'd use it

Reach for RICE when you have more ideas than time and need a fair, explainable way to order them. It's especially handy for defending a roadmap to stakeholders, because the ranking comes from stated assumptions instead of whoever argued loudest.

Common beginner mistakes

  • Treating the score as objective truth. It's only as good as your estimates — garbage guesses in, confident-looking garbage out.
  • Forgetting the Confidence term. A wildly optimistic Reach and Impact should be discounted by low confidence, or shaky ideas float to the top unfairly.

Try it — edit and run

Click the code to edit · press ⌘/Ctrl+↵ to run

Editable code. Tab and Shift+Tab indent. Press Escape, then Tab, to move focus out of the editor.

Expected output — hit Run to try it
Ranked by RICE score:
1. Faster search — 5400
2. Dark mode — 1600
3. New logo — 625
Build first: Faster search

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