Is your company always focused on one-time opportunities? Are you always unclear on what requirements to clarify next? Projects changing all the time? I've been there. In April 2019 I joined an Artificial Intelligence company which was mainly driven by sales opportunities with no focus on long-term goals. You can imagine how difficult it was for me to define product requirements that made sense in the long-run and to write user stories that met teams' "definition of ready". In this talk I want to share one technique that helped me aligning stakeholders towards priorities and being clear of what was coming next: RICE prioritization. I will share my struggles and successes on getting there.

1. ba-beyond.eu — #BABeyond20
13 October 2020
Add some RICE
to your organisation
Antonio Gonzalez Sanchis

2. Antonio
González
ADD
RICE
TO YOUR ORGANIZATION

3. Product Manager

4. “For 20 years, Verbio Technologies has been on the
cutting-edge of voice technologies to simplify human-
machine communication. We are now a global
Conversational AI provider, trusted by the most valuable
companies worldwide thanks to our technical excellence
and expertise, empowered by passion and customer-
centric commitment.”

5. “For 20 years, Verbio Technologies has been on the
cutting-edge of voice technologies to simplify human-
machine communication. We are now a global
Conversational AI provider, trusted by the most valuable
companies worldwide thanks to our technical excellence
and expertise, empowered by passion and customer-
centric commitment.”

6. Around 80 employees
worldwide.
Zero business analysts.
Zero product owners.
Zero “product people”.
5 offices.
Typical clients are
multinational companies
with no Voice technologies’
knowledge in-house.
Consultancy business
model.
ABOUT VERBIO

7. Around 80 employees
worldwide.
Zero business analysts.
Zero product owners.
Zero “product people”.
5 offices.
Typical clients are
multinational companies
with no Voice technologies’
knowledge in-house.
Consultancy business
model.
ABOUT VERBIO

8. CEO:
“Our current business model doesn’t allow us to scale”.
Sales:
“We don’t know what we can sell”.
Marketing:
“We don’t have a product to advertise”.
Teams:
“Continuous interruptions and changes on projects”.
“We never see the results of our work in production”.
CHALLENGES

9. CEO:
“Our current business model doesn’t allow us to scale”.
Sales:
“We don’t know what we can sell”.
Marketing:
“We don’t have a product to advertise”.
Teams:
“Continuous interruptions and changes on projects”.
“We never see the results of our work in production”.
CHALLENGES

10. "Simplicity
- the art of maximising the
amount of work
not done -
is essential"

11. HiPPO
MOSCOW Cost of Delay
OPTIONS

12. Dot Voting Value/Effort
Kano model
OPTIONS

13. RICE
Simple tool for prioritization that uses 4 variables:
R each
I mpact
C onfidence
E ffort

14. Reach is measured in number of people/events per
time period. It is a high level estimation of how many
people each idea will affect.
REACH
For example: How many people will this project
impact over a single quarter? That might be
presenting reach in terms of “customers per quarter”.
Try to use real measurements from product metrics
instead of making numbers up.

15. Estimation of the impact on an individual person
from your reach.
IMPACTImpact is difficult to measure so it’s easier to use a
multiple-choice scale: 5 for massive impact, 1 for
minimal impact.
For example: “How will this new feature increment
customer’s satisfaction level?”

16. Factor in your level of confidence about your other
estimates (reach, impact and effort). If you consider
an idea will have a low impact but don’t have enough
data to back it up, confidence lets you take that into
consideration.
CONFIDENCE
It is a percentage so you can use another multiple-
choice scale like for example: 100% is high confidence,
10 is low confidence.

17. Estimation of the total amount of time an idea will
take.
EFFORT
You can use another multiple-choice scale: 100 being
a huge idea, 50 being a medium-sized idea and 5
being a quick item.

18. RICE =
Reach x Impact x Confidence
Effort
_____________________________

19. SIMPLE
EXAMPLE

20. It uses numbers.
Real data - minimize assumptions.
Constructive conversations.
Easy to explain.
PROS AND CONS

21. What about BAU tasks?
When do you “stop”?
How to handle ideas with different
orders of magnitude for the effort?
PROS AND CONS

22. OUR JOURNEY

23. OUR JOURNEY

24. OUR JOURNEY

25. OUR JOURNEY

26. OUR JOURNEY

27. OUR JOURNEY

28. ADAPTATIONS
We used multiple-choice options for every category (0 to 10).
As we didn’t have “real data”, it was easier for us to assess
Reach and impact.
We talked about Ease instead of effort.
Conversations around effort were taking too long as people
were getting into very granular estimations. Changing to
Ease and use a scale from 0 to 10 made the exercise way
more efficient.

29. Clear process to consider new business
opportunities and ideas.
Everyone had visibility on “what was
going on”.
Stakeholders alignment.
RESULTS

30. Lack of “independent” follow up.
Everyone was using numbers to have "their"
ideas at the top.
RESULTS

31. Alignment on what we are building as a product.
Everyone had visibility on which ideas were being
built and what were coming next.
Easier for Sales and Marketing teams to explain
clients what we were doing.
Increased cross-functional collaboration.
Focus. Less interruptions to teams.
IMPACT IN THE
COMPANY

32. Stakeholders alignment.
Better understanding on which project to focus on
to elicit requirements.
Better plan of work.
Easier to assess future needs and considerations
when defining products.
Focus. Less interruptions.
IMPACT IN BA TASKS

33. Seek consistency, not accuracy.
As much as possible, assess your assumptions using
“real data”.
Hide all columns that you are not discussing so
people don’t use numbers to move their ideas
higher or lower.
Ask yourself what can help you increase confidence
on each idea.
Include representatives from every department.
Keep it alive. Update it regularly with new
information. Schedule time for it.
TIPS

34. PRIORITIZE
TIPS

35. THANK YOU!
ADD
RICE
TO YOUR ORGANIZATION