RICE with Deferred Confidence and Effort
Score reach and impact first; sit with the innovative bets before letting C and E kill them.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 91%
RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) is simple and robust, but the C and E terms systematically bury the most innovative ideas — precisely because high-reach, high-impact ideas are the ones whose confidence and effort are legitimately murky. Iyengar's modification: run reach and impact, then deliberately withhold C and E while a cross-functional group spends real time trying to solve the top ideas. Only after that do you score C and E and rank as usual.
Origin
A modification to the RICE framework (popularised by Intercom) developed at Mixpanel by Vijay Iyengar's team after an early-2022 prioritisation exercise in which RICE-ing every idea pushed all the high-reach, high-impact bets to the bottom of the list.
Core principles
- 01Confidence and effort are murky for innovative ideas by definition — and RICE punishes murk.
- 02Murkiness is a property of your current understanding, not of the idea. A week of real work usually resolves it.
- 03A good portfolio is a deliberate mix of innovative bets, incremental bets, and necessary technical/product work.
- 04The C term is the weakest of the four — Lenny drops it entirely; Iyengar defers it.
- 05The tool doesn't matter. This is a local team exercise; a simple table in a doc is enough.
How to run it
- 1
Score reach and impact only
Run the ideas through R and I. Do not score confidence or effort yet, and do not let anyone rank on them informally either.
- 2
Sit with the high-reach, high-impact ideas longer than is comfortable
Take the top R×I ideas and put engineers and designers in a room genuinely committed to trying to solve them. Give it a fair shot — roughly a week of concentrated attention.
Pro tip You will often find a higher-confidence or lower-effort way to do the thing that simply wasn't visible from the outside.
Watch out This must be a real solving attempt with the people who would build it, not a PM guessing at feasibility alone.
- 3
Add C and E back in
Now that confidence and effort are informed rather than guessed, score them and RICE as usual.
- 4
Check the portfolio mix
The goal of the exercise is not a ranked list for its own sake — it is to land on a reasonable mix of innovative bets, incremental bets, and the technical or product work you simply have to address.
In the wild
Early in 2022, one of Mixpanel's teams scored all its ideas with standard RICE. The high-reach, high-impact ideas all landed at the bottom of the list because their confidence and effort were murky — as they should be for genuinely innovative work.
→ The team adopted the deferred-C-and-E exercise: a week of committed solutioning on the top R×I ideas before scoring, which surfaced higher-confidence, lower-effort paths and prevented premature deprioritisation.
Common mistakes
Letting murky C and E deprioritise the innovation
Uncertainty in confidence and effort is the signature of an innovative bet, not evidence against it. Scoring it up front converts uncertainty into a penalty and guarantees a roadmap of only incremental work.
Estimating confidence and effort without the builders
The week of solutioning only resolves the murk if engineers and designers are in the room and actually committed to trying to solve the problem.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product teams that use RICE and notice their roadmap has become entirely incremental, with all ambitious bets ranked at the bottom
Not ideal for
Pure fire-fighting or table-stakes gap-closing phases where speed matters more than the innovation mix
From the transcript
“one of the traps with rice that we observed is that the c and e the confidence and effort tends to cause you to prematurely…”
“just ignore the c and e for a little longer than it's comfortable and and just sit with those high reach high impact ideas with…”
“then add the CNE back in and then rice as usual”
From the episode
An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey
Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product)