RICE Prioritization Template

What is the RICE Prioritization template?

Gain a bigger perspective on what to develop first by estimating your ideas and projects with the RICE method. Stay on track with your roadmap by prioritizing the most important tasks and focusing on the items that will bring you the most success. Don’t get overwhelmed with hundreds of new ideas but think about the potential values.

Adapt the RICE prioritization method to your needs and consider each project and its feasibility. When used correctly, it can have a huge impact on the growth of your business. The acronyms stand for:

• Reach — How many people will be affected by the project? Here, measure the number of people impacted by the work on the new project. Let it be the number of unique users per month or transactions per year.
• Impact — How much does the project affect the current users? Here, mark whether the work has a minimal (0.25) or massive (3) impact.
• Confidence — How sure are you that the project will have the desired impact? Here, take a look at the data and evaluate your confidence score in percentages. 100% is absolute confidence, 80% corresponds to optimism but not total certainty, and anything below 50% signifies low belief.
• Effort — What is the total amount of time or effort needed to complete the project? Here, measure the score in hours or in person months (the amount of work one can execute in a month).

What are the benefits of the RICE Prioritization template?

Thanks to the RICE Prioritization template, you can:

• Focus only on specific goals per particular period of time and take up new tasks only after being ready with older ones.
• Allow your teammates to decide which projects they want to tackle first to give them more sense of ownership over tasks.
• See which features to prioritize and devote more time to.
• Discover new ways of improving your product that you haven’t thought of before by engaging team members in the decision-making process.
• Align stakeholders with what is being built at the moment and what will matter most in the upcoming months.

How to use the RICE Prioritization template in a few steps?

1. Open the template on a blank whiteboard or add it to an already created one.
2. List out the features, ideas, or projects that you want to focus on in the first column. Keep their names short and write them down on available sticky notes.
3. Proceed to the next column and consider how many users will use a particular feature in a given period of time. Write the estimated amount of the users’ reach on a sticky note.
4. Evaluate the impact of a particular feature in the next column. Think about how much it affects the users. Write the estimated amount on a sticky note assuming that 0.25 corresponds to minimal impact and 3 corresponds to massive impact.
5. Move to the next column and define your confidence score. Write down your estimates in the form of percentages on sticky notes.
6. Think about how much time and resources will be needed from different teams to focus on a particular feature. Measure the efforts in hours or person-months (the work one team member can execute in a month).
7. Calculate the score for a particular task using a simple calculation: Reach x Impact x Confidence / Effort.