RICE Prioritisation Calculator

RICE prioritisation gives product teams a repeatable way to compare ideas that otherwise feel hard to rank. The score combines how many people an initiative may reach, how strongly it may affect them, how confident you are in the evidence, and how much effort it will take.

The calculator is best used for relative comparison. A score of 800 is not good or bad on its own; it becomes useful when another idea scores 250 or 1,400 under the same assumptions.

Use it when you need a quick roadmap sorting pass before deeper discovery, engineering review, or commercial modelling. If you already know the likely revenue lift and build cost, the cost per feature calculator can give a more money-focused view.

Suppose a feature is expected to reach 1,200 users in the planning period. You rate impact as 2 on your team's scale, confidence as 80%, and effort as 3 person-months.

RICE score = 1,200 × 2 × 0.8 ÷ 3 = 640. If another feature reaches fewer users but takes only half a person-month, it may outrank this one even with lower total impact.

That trade-off is the point of the framework: it stops teams from only choosing loud ideas, pet projects, or large initiatives that consume capacity without enough evidence.

Reach should use the same time window for every idea, such as users per month, accounts per quarter, or customers affected in the next release. Do not mix monthly reach for one item with annual reach for another.

Impact is usually a simple internal scale. Many teams use 3 for massive impact, 2 for high, 1 for medium, 0.5 for low, and 0.25 for minimal. The exact scale matters less than using it consistently.

Confidence discounts weak evidence. A well-supported customer problem may deserve 80-100%. A hunch from a single conversation may be 20-50%. Effort should include design, engineering, QA, launch, migration, and operational work, not just coding time.

RICE is a decision aid, not an automatic roadmap. It can under-value strategic foundations, regulatory work, reliability fixes, brand trust, and customer promises that do not have neat reach numbers.

Scores are only as good as the inputs. If every idea is given high confidence or low effort, the ranking will mostly reflect optimism. Review the assumptions as a team before treating the order as settled.

For portfolio planning, combine the score with constraints such as dependencies, risk, sequencing, revenue goals, and whether the work supports a clear product strategy.