Using RICE for B2B products

Be collaborative and transparent with business and ops

Some years ago I came across an interesting article from Intercom about a prioritization framework called RICE (i.e. Reach - Impact - Confidence - Effort), and I would like to share what worked for me in a B2B environment, and why this framework is one of the most powerful from a list of prioritization techniques.

The RICE Score as introduced by Intercom

Use RICE to align with Business & Ops

You should start with collecting every business and ops requirement. You can run an offline commenting process with deadlines to realize which are the stakeholders’ expectations. Don’t rush to go into a meeting room, see what they have to raise. In parallel, you should work with the Engineering Manager, and define the tech debt, and we enriched our backlog with them as well.

Here is the nice thing. For B2B, you can allocate each criterion to different stakeholders, in the following way (based on the number and type of stakeholders, you can adjust this):

• Reach is given to the business. They define how many clients are expected to be affected by these stories, based on their interviews. It is an opportunity to elaborate and share their insights. Business Intelligence working close with the team, can also clarify the reasoning behind this score.

• Impact is given to operations. They define how these features will allow them to meet their goals. If not a profit, they define a cost reduction. For a B2B company, the operations are a great source of feedback, otherwise, the PM should represent the users and the market. Of course, if the business can define the size of the opportunity, you can use it as well.

• Effort is given mainly to engineering. You should include also the PM and Product Design effort, especially since the latter is forgotten in cost and time calculation, while it is one of the first steps of the execution.

• Confidence is managed by you (the PM). Having listened to different opinions, and run your research, you can identify the maturity of an idea and you vote on the reasoning of the team members.

You can run this score-giving process in iteration. As you see big epics, you can break them down into smaller stories; The smaller the task, the easier it is to quantify, thus prioritize. You should not forget to ask for the score givers for quantitative and qualitative feedback so that you understand the context, and it’s important to expand your opportunities and be inclusive in that stage; You should not forget to define options that will put some extra “magic” to your planning. However, whatever the RICE score, you shouldn’t prioritize like this, you need to go into a workshop with your team.

RICE builds a Backlog, not a Roadmap

By now, you should have an ordered list of features in an excel file. Don’t get confused, this is not your Product Roadmap yet. And you should not design a voting mechanism for building a roadmap; until now you had been a facilitator, and now you start being the product manager that makes decisions.

To move forward, you should organize a product workshop. Start with defining the product goals for the next 3 years and agreed on the annual goals of the domain (the first day of a design sprint). Under this goal, you should identify the themes of the epics, aka the main pillars on which your roadmap will focus.

Under this context, you should start discussing the stories you have created and the given score, and the problem that each story tries to solve. As a PM, based on the discussion, you can adjust your confidence score.

At the end of the process, you have a prioritized backlog, based on the given RICE score. Now try to see about (a) dependencies, requiring a story to go higher in the priority, and (b) see if the stories that are higher in priority fit into the problems that you have identified as the most important for your product strategy and the goals you have set.

Finally, try to tell a story. If you can’t, you are missing potentially the big picture and you should go into a Design Sprint with your team before you start again working on Roadmapping. Don’t stay on any RICE score, any excel file, or something similar. If your story about your user experience doesn’t make sense, your backlog is incomplete and needs adjustments.

Being transparent builds trust

Try not to be biased in that process; the fact that you own the confidence score should challenge you more to clarify where there is uncertainty so that you and your team have a clear view. This backlog should be your prioritized list of opportunities and not a contract, which you manage as you get more insights and data, and potentially you may want to adjust your priorities. The best part of using this process is that you will have won the trust and the confidence of other departments and stakeholders, knowing that you have taken into consideration many different aspects, while you can communicate your vision and way of thinking clearly. Personally, I have seen the whole team dynamics change positively after the completion of this process.

Note: Sticking on frameworks is not ideal for Product Managers, you should look at how a framework fits your needs. This post explains how a well-known framework like RICE was found useful in the B2B world for me. As a team and an organization evolve, a framework may evolve into a culture, and you can use it in your own way. Feel free to share your own experiences with B2B prioritization, with or without RICE.