Understanding Prioritization and the RICE Framework

Designers, developers, indie-makers, and product managers face the prioritization challenge: What product feature should we work on first? Originally published by Sean McBride, a product manager at Intercom, the RICE framework is a simple way to score potential product features to reduce assumptions and guesswork in roadmap planning.

RICE became a widely adopted method in product development, helping teams focus their efforts and maximize the value of their time.

If you’ve put the effort into brainstorming new ideas, finding opportunities for improvement, and collecting feedback, you’ll have a solid product roadmap full of good ideas. But the order in which you tackle those ideas deserves just as much thought. It would be best if you took the time to prioritize well.

Including everything would make the product complicated and worse. Thus, UX relies heavily on prioritization to determine what features add the most value relative to the resources needed to deliver them.

Prioritization helps us to determine which features or elements to prioritize based on user needs and project goals. We prioritize and rank design requirements, features, or elements in order of importance.