While frameworks like RICE appear scientific, their inputs are highly subjective. Their primary value isn't for making decisions, but for providing a seemingly objective, data-driven justification to decline stakeholder or management feature requests that don't align with the current strategy.
Related Insights
If a team is constantly struggling with prioritization, the root cause isn't poor task management; it's the absence of a clear, unifying strategy. A strong, insight-based strategy makes prioritization implicit, naturally aligning the organization and reducing distractions.
Treat your product and engineering teams as stewards of the company's most precious capital: their time. A capital allocation framework forces leadership to ask if this "investment" is being spent on the initiatives with the highest strategic return, not just fulfilling requests.
Instead of relying on subjective scores from frameworks like RICE, use a simple "What and Why" statement for each feature. This narrative approach, which includes a "Why now?" justification, provides clearer strategic alignment and is more persuasive for stakeholders than an abstract number.
Instead of complex prioritization frameworks like RICE, designers can use a more intuitive model based on Value, Cost, and Risk. This mirrors the mental calculation humans use for everyday decisions, allowing for a more holistic and natural conversation about project trade-offs.
Post-IPO, sales-driven feature requests can derail the roadmap. Pendo's CPO advises creating a formal process, often with a dedicated program manager, to analyze commits for broad applicability and explicitly calculate the opportunity cost against the strategic roadmap before approving them.
When using prioritization frameworks like RICE for AI-generated ideas, human oversight is crucial. The 'Confidence' score for a feature ideated by AI should be intentionally set low. This forces the team to conduct real user testing before gaining confidence, preventing unverified AI suggestions from being fast-tracked.
As companies scale, roadmaps become a list of stakeholder commitments. To maintain focus, leaders must relentlessly communicate the "why" behind every initiative and tie it to a clear investment ROI. This ensures all teams are running in the same direction, not just checking boxes.
In environments with highly interconnected and fragile systems, simple prioritization frameworks like RICE are inadequate. A feature's priority must be assessed by its ripple effect across the entire value chain, where a seemingly minor internal fix can be the highest leverage point for the end user.
To handle feature requests from customers or your team without getting derailed, create a 'not right now' list. This validates the suggestion and shows leadership by prioritizing, but protects the team's focus on essential work, preserving morale and focus.
When teams constantly struggle with prioritization, the root cause isn't poor backlog management. It's a failure of upstream strategic filters like market segmentation, pricing, and product discovery. Without these filters, the feature list becomes an unmanageable mess of competing demands.
