What is the RICE framework?
The RICE framework is a prioritisation model used by growth and marketing teams to score ideas objectively before committing time and resources. Each idea is scored using four factors — Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort — producing a single numeric RICE score. The higher the score, the higher the priority.
It is one of several popular prioritisation frameworks used alongside ICE, PIE, and PXL to bring structure and consistency to marketing experimentation.
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Open Table of contents
Prioritisation Frameworks
There are a number of prioritisation frameworks, or scoring frameworks available to modern growth teams and marketing teams. The most popular frameworks along with their individual scoring factors are shown below.
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RICE - Developed by Sean McBride at Intercom. Scoring factors: Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort.
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ICE - Developed by Sean Ellis at GrowthHackers. Scoring factors: Impact, Confidence, Effort.
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PIE - Developed by Chris Goward at WiderFunnel. Scoring factors: Potential, Importance, Ease.
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HiPPO - No specific developer. Scoring factor: Highest paid person’s opinion.
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BRASS - Developed by David Arnoux at Growth Tribe. Scoring factors: Blink, Relevance, Availability, Scalability, Score.
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HIPE - Developed by Jeff Chang at Pinterest. Scoring factors: Hypothesis, Investment, Precedent, Experience.
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DICET - Developed by Jeff Mignon at Pentalog. Scoring factors: Dollars (or revenue) generated, Impact, Confidence, Ease, Time-to-money.
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PXL - Developed by Peep Laja at CXL. Scoring factors: Above the fold, noticeable within 5 sec, high traffic pages, ease of implementation, and more.
The frameworks include a number of factors that combine to produce a numeric score - the higher the score, the higher priority, and the earlier the experiment should be done. The end result for growth marketers and growth marketing teams being a prioritised to-do list of the best opportunities to test.
Introducing the RICE score
The RICE framework was first introduced by Sean McBride, a former product manager at Intercom. The framework adds an additional ‘Reach’ factor to the traditional ICE framework. Scoring is therefore based on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.
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R = Reach
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I = Impact
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C = Confidence
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E = Effort
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Score = (R x I x C) / E
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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.
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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
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High impact = 2x
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Medium impact = 1x
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Low impact = 0.5x
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Minimal impact = 0.25x
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Confidence - What level of confidence do you have in your estimates? Do you have data to back up your prediction? Have you done something similar before, or know someone else that has?
High confidence = 100%
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Medium confidence = 80%
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Low confidence = 50%
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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.
Calculating a RICE Score
The final RICE score is calculated using the following formula:
(Reach × Impact × Confidence) / Effort
A RICE framework example
Let’s apply the RICE model to a real campaign idea: publishing a new article targeting the keyword “marketing experimentation framework” for a B2B SaaS marketing team.
Context: The team runs a content programme and is deciding whether to prioritise this article over three other ideas in the backlog. They want an objective score to guide the decision.
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Reach — Based on keyword research, the primary term attracts approximately 400 searches/month globally, with a realistic estimate of 80 organic visits/month once ranked on page 1. They use 80 as their Reach figure for the next quarter.
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Impact — The article targets a bottom-of-funnel audience actively researching experimentation tools. The team rates this as high impact: 2x.
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Confidence — The team has previously ranked similar articles in the top 5 for comparable terms. They rate confidence at 80% (medium-high).
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Effort — The article will take approximately 2 days to research, write, and publish. Effort = 2.
RICE score: (80 × 2 × 0.8) / 2 = 64
Compared against other backlog ideas scoring 18, 31, and 42, this article is the clear top priority.
RICE prioritisation in Growth Method
The Growth Method app includes the ability to prioritise marketing and growth ideas using scoring frameworks including ICE, with support for RICE and custom frameworks on the roadmap.
Resources
Recommended additional reading on the RICE scoring framework and prioritisation in general. You may also be interested in learning about the DRICE framework, a modern and more detailed approach to prioritisation that builds on RICE. For a simpler alternative, see the ICE framework or the PIE framework.
Final thoughts
For growth marketing teams, the specifics of the various different scoring frameworks, and their pros and cons matter 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
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