RICE scoring, in depth
RICE’s virtue is the Confidence term: it explicitly discounts excitement about ideas with thin evidence. A high-impact guess with 50% confidence scores below a modest improvement you are sure about — which is usually the right call and rarely the instinctive one.
Its weakness is spurious precision. Reach and impact are estimates, often soft ones, and multiplying estimates compounds their error. Use RICE to rank order and expose disagreements (“why is your reach 10× mine?”), not to defend a 340-versus-320 verdict as meaningful.
Putting it into practice
Ground the estimates in your feedback data: request counts and roadmap votes anchor Reach, the intensity of what users wrote anchors Impact, and the volume of corroborating evidence anchors Confidence. That data is what a structured feedback stream — like a TellTide inbox — exists to supply.