The DRICE framework: a modern prioritization framework

The DRICE is a new framework published in late 2023 by Darius Contractor and Alexey Komissarouk the DRICE framework is a prioritisation framework designed to help marketing and growth teams determine the order in which to work on experiment ideas.

If you boil down the role of a CMO or growth marketing leader to just one task - it’s making sure everyone on the team knows what to do next - and that it’s the most impactful work they can be doing. If you can get better at prioritising, you can grow your leverage as a marketing/growth leader, and increase the impact you and your team drive.

Prioritisation frameworks help marketing and growth teams to:

Manage internal stakeholders
Bring transparency to team priorities in a quantifiable way
Eliminate opinions around what is and isn’t important
Empower people to share ideas they feel will have impact

What are the key scoring frameworks?

Opportunity evaluation is an important skill for any high impact growth team that will improve over time. Working on the right projects instead of the wrong ones has a huge impact on team results. These scoring help you to determine what to prioritise and the best places to start.

A number of frameworks existing for evaluating opportunities and prioritising your marketing resources. Some of the most popular are shown below.

RICE: Developed by Sean McBride at Intercom. Scoring factors: Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort.
ICE: Developed by Sean Ellis at GrowthHackers. Scoring factors: Impact, Confidence, Effort.
PIE: Developed by Chris Goward at WiderFunnel. Scoring factors: Potential, Importance, Ease.
HiPPO: Highest paid person’s opinion. Developed by n/a.
BRASS: Developed by David Arnoux at Growth Tribe. Scoring factors: Blink, Relevance, Availability, Scalability, Score.
HIPE: Developed by Jeff Chang at Pinterest. Scoring factors: Hypothesis, Investment, Precedent, Experience.
DICET: Developed by Jeff Mignon at Pentalog. Scoring factors: Dollars (or revenue) generated, Impact, Confidence, Ease, Time-to-money.
PXL: Developed by Peep Laja at CXL. Scoring factors: Above the fold, noticeable within 5 sec, high traffic pages, ease of implemention and more.

DRICE framework history

DRICE is a relatively new framework published in late 2023 by Darius Contractor and Alexey Komissarouk which builds on the popular ICE model to help marketing and growth teams determine the order in which to work on experiment ideas.

Once your RICEd shortlist is ready, it’s time to invest in a higher-fidelity evaluation of your ideas. This assessment method is known as DRICE, a “Detailed RICE” estimate.

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/introducing-drice-a-modern-prioritization

How to use the DRICE prioritisation framework

Unlike some other prioritisation frameworks DRICE is specifically designed for growth and experimentation and finding great growth opportunities.

DRICE stands for a “Detailed RICE” estimate, hence you complete your RICE score in the usual way before adding the Detail. During DRICE teams go from:

A 30-second estimate to a 30-minute estimate
A relative scoring to a $X of expected revenue
“Wouldn’t it be cool if” to “We are shovel-ready”

The goal is to get from a low-fidelity and directional best guess (aka SWAG) to a more educated detailed estimate.

The DRICE framework formula

Below are the core elements of the framework:

D: Detail. This includes Hypothesis, Impact estimate, Engineering estimate and Return estimate (more detail below).
R: Reach. How many people will this affect within a given period? Depending on your team or company goal, this could be the number of new visitors per month, or subscribers per quarter, or quote requests per year.
I: Impact. How much impact will this have on individual users? For example, how much could this change impact the quote request conversion rate? This is measured on a multiple choice scale:

Massive impact = 3x

High impact = 2x
Medium impact = 1x
Low impact = 0.5x
Minimal impact = 0.25x
C: Confidence. What level of confidence do you have in your estimates? Do you have data to backup your prediction? Have you done something similar before, or know someone else that has?

High confidence = 100%

Medium confidence = 80%
Low confidence = 50%
E: Effort. The total amount of time (typically in days) a project will require to make live. This should include any other teams that may need to be involved before it is launched - development, engineering, product marketing, product management etc.

Adding Detail to RICE

Adding Detail to your RICE score involves:

A hypothesis - 1-paragraph explanation of the project and why you’re excited about it.
An impact estimate - A simple model estimating the impact of the project, backed by research, peer discussions, and use of existing data.
A build/engineering estimate - A brief investigation by whoever is going to build out the project including validation of assumptions behind the original estimate.
A return estimate - Estimation of ROI by dividing the impact estimate by the build estimate

Teams typically find that spending 30 minutes in the detail can dramatically change the priority order of projects - as new approaches emerge that increase the likelihood of success or dramatically reduce build/engineering time.

Resources

Recommended additional reading on the DRICE scoring framework and prioritisation in general.

Final thoughts

For marketing and growth teams, the specifics of the various different scoring frameworks, and their pros and cons matters far less than picking one and implementing it within your team.

Creativity combined with rapid iteration are the keys to making progress on user growth. Remember that you can get to 10X growth by a combination of 2Xing a few different metrics, hitting one out of the park, or getting 10% increases across the board. They all multiply together to be 10X. If you can brainstorm a lot of ideas, going for quantity over quality, you’ll have a lot of ideas to evaluate for impact versus cost.

Andrew Chen

Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn or on Twitter.