What is a good RICE score?

There is no absolute good score. RICE scores only mean something compared with other ideas scored the same way, at the same time.

What is the difference between RICE and WSJF?

RICE weighs reach and evidence against effort. WSJF weighs cost of delay, including urgency, against job size, and is common in SAFe teams.

GLOSSARY

What is RICE scoring?

RICE is one of the most widely used ways to compare product ideas. Here's how the score works, what it's good for and where it can mislead you.

Updated 29 September 2026

Definition

RICE scoring ranks ideas by Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort. The score is Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort, which lets a team compare very different ideas on one scale. The method was developed by the product team at Intercom.

What it is in practice

For each idea, the team estimates four things. Reach is how many people it affects in a set period, such as a quarter. Impact is how much it moves the needle for each of them, usually on a scale from 0.25 (minimal) to 3 (massive). Confidence is how sure you are about the other estimates, as a percentage. Effort is the work involved, usually in person-months.

Multiply the first three and divide by effort. The result has no unit; it only means something next to the scores of other ideas. A high score says: many people, real impact, good evidence, not much work.

The Confidence factor is what makes RICE useful. It pulls down exciting ideas that nobody has evidence for, and makes the team say where its numbers came from.

An example from Pulse Analytics

In the Meridian Labs demo, Pulse Analytics is self-serve analytics for internal teams. Saved views for dashboards reaches almost everyone who opens a dashboard, and the team has requests to back it up, so reach and confidence are high and effort is modest. A metric definition review flow has high impact for the people who manage the catalogue, but reaches fewer people and needs more work. RICE puts saved views first, and the team can see exactly why.

Common mistakes

Using different time periods for Reach across ideas, which makes the scores incomparable.
Setting Confidence to 100% by default. Without evidence, it should be lower.
Treating the score as the decision. RICE doesn't capture strategy, dependencies or deadlines.
Comparing scores from different scoring sessions, when the team's scales have drifted.

How Ondule handles this

Ondule doesn't calculate RICE scores inside the app. Score ideas in the free RICE calculator, then add the winners to your product's backlog as epics, linked to the milestone and objective they serve.

Questions

What does RICE stand for?: Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort.
What is a good RICE score?: There is no absolute good score. RICE scores only mean something compared with other ideas scored the same way, at the same time.
What is the difference between RICE and WSJF?: RICE weighs reach and evidence against effort. WSJF weighs cost of delay, including urgency, against job size, and is common in SAFe teams.