Taming the Endless Feature Requests with R.I.C.E. Scoring

As a founder, you’re constantly juggling a million things – keeping customers happy, managing the team, running sales & marketing, and the list just on. But one area that’s always a challenge?

Prioritizing what to build next.

You’ve got a massive backlog of feature requests from customers, ideas from your team, and your own vision as a founder.

But you can’t build it all at once. So how do you decide what to tackle first?

That’s where the R.I.C.E. scoring model comes in.

It’s a simple prioritization framework that’s been a game-changer for me in bringing order to the product chaos. Let me walk you through how it works.

The Four Factors

R.I.C.E. stands for:

Reach: How many customers/users will this impact? The broader the reach, the higher the potential impact.

Impact: How much will this improve the customer’s experience or address their pain point? High impact = more valuable.

Confidence: How confident are we that this will actually deliver the intended impact? Lower confidence = higher risk.

Effort: How much time and resources are required to build and ship this? More effort = higher cost.

For each feature request or idea, you score it on a scale of 1-5 for each of those four factors.

Calculating Priorities

Once you have those four scores, you calculate the overall R.I.C.E. score with this formula:

R.I.C.E. Score = (Reach * Impact * Confidence) / Effort

The highest scores represent your top priorities – the features that will potentially deliver the most value with the least effort and risk.

For example, let’s say you’re considering building a new reporting dashboard:

• Reach = 4 (most customers would use it)
• Impact = 5 (huge pain point to address)
• Confidence = 3 (we’ve built reports before but not this exact one)
• Effort = 2 (relatively low effort)

The R.I.C.E score would be: (4 * 5 * 3) / 2 = 30

Compare that to building a niche integration:

• Reach = 2 (only a few customers have asked for it)
• Impact = 4 (it would solve a problem, but not critical)
• Confidence = 4 (we’ve built integrations before)
• Effort = 4 (would take significant engineering time)

The R.I.C.E. score is just: (2 * 4 * 4) / 4 = 8

So the reporting dashboard is clearly the higher priority based on its much higher R.I.C.E. score.

But Don’t Treat It Like Gospel

Now R.I.C.E. is a great starting framework, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. There are some key caveats:

1. The scores are still subjective – You’re making educated guesses on reach, impact, etc. So take them with a grain of salt.
2. Long-term impact isn’t captured – R.I.C.E. looks at short-term impact, but maybe a feature sets you up for something bigger down the road. Hard to quantify that.
3. It doesn’t account for dependencies – Sometimes you need to build X before you can build Y. R.I.C.E doesn’t factor those dependencies.
4. It prioritizes quick wins – Because effort is in the denominator, it naturally biases towards smaller projects. The highest score isn’t always the right strategic priority.

So use R.I.C.E. as a data point, but don’t let it make every decision for you. Combined with other inputs like your long-term strategy, technical dependencies, and market insights, it becomes a powerful prioritization tool.

Making It a Routine

At Castos, we’ve institutionalized R.I.C.E. scoring as part of our quarterly planning process, and any time that we have ad hoc product prioritization decisions to make.

We first review our product strategy to understand what key objectives we’re trying to achieve that quarter (e.g. reduce churn, unlock a new segment, boost upsells, etc).

Then we take all the potential projects – from customer requests to brilliant ideas from a hair-brained founder – and score them with R.I.C.E.

We take the top scorers and map them to our objectives for the quarter.

This has helped us stay focused and disciplined rather than getting distracted by the shiny new feature of the week. We still review and re-score projects each quarter (or just as needed if we feel the product roadmap is less clear) as situations evolve.

The process isn’t perfect, but it’s infinitely better than the chaos of trying to prioritize everything in our heads or based on whichever customer is yelling the loudest that week.

Your Sanity Savior

As a founder, you’re constantly barraged with demands, requests, and ideas from all directions. Not to mention stakeholders, both internally and externally.

The R.I.C.E. framework gives you a rational way to evaluate and prioritize what to build next.

Is it going to solve all your prioritization problems? Of course not. But it provides a simple, consistent model to inject some data-driven sanity into the process.

If you aren’t using some kind of prioritization framework already, give R.I.C.E. a try.

It just might be the salve you need to tame the endless feature insanity and keep making forward progress.