Prioritize content design work like a pro with RICE 🍚
Learn how to use RICE, one of the most used product management frameworks, to prioritize content design tasks and focus on what matters.
One of the most recurring concepts one comes across in the Scrum PSPO I certification is that product owners (or managers) are value maximizers. That is, their role is to maximize the return on investment of a product. In other words, their job is to make sure their teams spend time on work that delivers the highest possible value.
Since there are always more ideas than there are resources available to carry them on, the challenge resides in deciding which tasks their teams should focus on first and which ones later. That’s why it’s often said that one of the most important jobs of a product manager is saying No.
Frameworks help them build the right thing. They do so by providing objective, consistent, and transparent criteria to evaluate ideas. That’s why product managers rely on frameworks a lot.
I’m a content designer, why should I care?
Saying ‘No’, has also been a recurrent topic for content design lately. While that can be approached from the angle of challenging design decisions, the nature of our role and the overall maturity of our craft often lead us to serving multiple teams to having to juggle between conflicting priorities.
While saying ‘Yes’ to everything may seem like the only way to prove our value, doing so has its tolls. I can think of burnout and, above all, superficial impact.
By prioritizing work, we can become more efficient. By filtering through all the work that comes our way, we can actually make sure that we focus on what really brings value to the business, to users, and to ourselves. It’s time content designers become value maximizers too.
One thing you can do is help people understand what their goals are. And part of how you can do that is by helping to prioritize and rank things. So, if you’re given a list of 10 things to build, rather than saying ‘Yes boss’ or ‘No, we don’t have a strategy’, it’s like ‘Cool, which of these do you think is most important and why? […] If you were to put these in order, which is the most important and which is the least important?’
In a lot of cases we don’t really know what our goals are until we have a choice to make. — Matt LeMay
Why do I need a framework?
As product teams evolve and content designers become a must-have, we have the opportunity to cultivate relationships with stakeholders we haven’t been focusing too much on until now. At the same time, the ability to influence processes and ways of working is becoming more and more part of our desirable skillset.
As I like to say, we need to learn to speak ‘Productese’. If, as we often claim, doing the writing is 10% of our job, then the remainder of the time should be about ‘understanding the real opportunity’, as Rachel McConnell says.
This idea is, in fact, at the core of Yael Ben David’s The Business of UX Writing, a seminal book on the principles of collaboration between content design and the larger product ecosystem.
In the book, she proposes to use a framework she named KAPOW, where P stands for Prioritize. RICE — or at least a lightweight version of it — is the framework she proposes to prioritize work.
In this article, I’m going to complement her approach and show you a hands-on example closer to how RICE is used by product managers.
RICE in action
But enough theory, let’s see how you can prioritize work using RICE, look at how to calculate the formula and explore each coefficient. After that, I’ll present a couple of variations that apply specifically to the content designer or UX writer role.
How is it calculated?
To calculate RICE, you assign a score to individual coefficients and then use the formula Reach * Impact * Confidence / Effort to calculate the final score.
Tasks
Everything starts with tasks. I’ll use a few imaginary tasks that you are likely to come across as a content designer. Create a table with all the coefficients and add an extra column for the final score.
Reach
The first coefficient to calculate is Reach. Reach represents the amount of users who will experience the result of your work. I’m proposing two methods to calculate this coefficient. Let’s call them ‘the standard method’ and ‘the content design method.’
The standard method for calculating Reach
This method is the one generally used for RICE and is especially suited if you have easy access to the data required to pull the numbers. Your Reach is the number of users who are impacted by or will experience the outcome of your work. It’s usually calculated within a fixed time frame, such as 1 month.
For example:
- The navigation menu labels are seen by all users. If you have a total of 5000 users who have 10 sessions per month, the Reach for the first task would be 50000.
- Users delete on average 2 files per day, which is 60 per month. 5000 users would delete 300000 files per month.
- With 1000 new monthly users estimation and the assumption that each user will see the onboarding once, the Reach of the third task would be 1000.
- The premium badge appears in a location seen by 500 users 10 times a month. The Reach of the fourth task is 5000.
- The internal tribe newsletter has a Reach of 100 users, who will likely open it once, so the Reach is 100.
Add the values to the table and move on to the next coefficient.
The content design method to calculate Reach
When you’re new at a company, it’s likely that collaborators are still learning how to leverage your skills. This may lead to requests coming to you from basically everywhere: internal teams, engineers, product, marketing, and so on.
I’ve been there, so I needed a scoring system for Reach that was closer to my day-to-day needs as a content designer. It had to be more agile without sacrificing the objectiveness that hard numbers have.
So I came up with this method to calculate Reach that is based on T-Shirt Sizing, an estimation technique commonly used to estimate engineering work. With the assumption that our main concern is proving our value, this method has the intent of favoring public-facing work over internal work or team-specific tasks.
This scoring is an example that worked for my specific context. I encourage you to reflect on what scoring system would work for yours and create your own. What matters is evaluating all tasks consistently. Apply this scoring system to Reach:
Impact
Impact is a coefficient used to measure how much a task contributes to business goals. Each organization has a unique way to assess value, so there is no one-size-fits-all solution. For the sake of this article, let’s imagine that you work at a place that uses OKRs.
OKRs are usually weighed, meaning they are given more or less priority based on how strategically important they are for the organization. Such weighing is often expressed in percentages. If OKRs are not weighed, I recommend to sit with your manager and assign each task using percentages so that their sum equals 100%.
For example:
Once you have that sorted, just link each task to an OKR and add it to the table.
Confidence
This coefficient represents how confident you are that, once you deliver your work, it will provide real value to the intended users. I find Confidence to play a significant role in the formula. A high Confidence score increases the likelihood that a task will be prioritized.
In his eBook ICE Done Right, Itamar Gilad says ‘[this , NDR] only works only if you test your ideas’, as a reinforcement of the fact that the framework favors getting out of the building.
Gilad also created a great tool to calculate Confidence: a Confidence Meter, so we’ll just use that. It’s worth knowing that you can recalculate Confidence and update your table as you gather new evidence for each task.
Assign an imaginary Confidence score based on the meter.
Content designers love heuristics and company guidelines—I do too. I didn’t know where they would fall in terms of Confidence, so I asked Itamar Gilad directly. His answer was that ‘[They fall into] thematic support. They can be useful to create a frame — what kind of ideas we will consider, but they don’t create strong evidence for any individual idea.’
Effort
Effort represents how much work you estimate each task will require. A common way to calculate Effort is in sprints. For example, 1 point = 1 sprint. You can also use decimal units if they’re smaller than 1 sprint. For example, at Intercom they use a scale from 0.25 to 3.
If the same project has multiple possible solutions that require different Effort, you can create separate entries in your table and evaluate all of them. This also makes RICE a good tool to evaluate the most efficient solution to the same problem, reducing the tendency to focus only on what’s cheap to build.
Total
With the scores for each coefficient, it’s possible to calculate the final score for each task and find out which one gets the highest priority. Apply the formula Score = Reach * Impact * Confidence / Effort.
Based on the results, your next task will be the second, reviewing copy for an item deletion modal, then you can move on to the following ones.
Even if the tasks are imaginary, this exercise shows how complicated and full of risks digital products are. The main risk comes, in fact, from focusing on work that doesn’t yield any value. Every time you’re focusing on a task, you’re implicitly renouncing to work on others, and that’s the gap that RICE tries to fill.
What I personally like about RICE is that it invites the gathering of as much evidence as possible. At the same time, it helps develop a muscle for estimating task effort, which is a desirable skill when being part of agile product teams.
The content design coefficient: Scale
While RICE works just fine in well-oiled teams with a healthy ratio to other collaborators, the reality is often different and content designers are often serving multiple teams. In this context, you won’t have capacity to be involved in every task, and providing collaborators with tools that allow them to deliver the same quality as you would may be your gateway to scaling.
So I came up with another coefficient that, when added to the equation, favors the prioritization of tasks that help scaling the craft. For example, it can be useful when you’re struggling to show the value of content design to the larger team or when you’re still considered ‘the copywriter’.
It may be unnecessary if the delivery and adoption of guidelines are part of your OKRs. In case they’re not, this coefficient will help you work around that limitation.
The coefficient is called Scale and has the following scoring system.
How should I add Scale to the equation?
With the Scale coefficient, the equation becomes Score = Reach * Impact * Confidence * Scale / Effort.
When trying to apply the new coefficient to the tasks and calculating the score again, it’s worth adding a new task that falls on the higher end of the scoring system, such as a content guidelines task. This should give you an idea of how the coefficient would influence the backlog in real life. Let’s imagine that this task is ‘Prepare voice & tone guidelines.’
Let’s also imagine that this task maps to a team OKR that consists in the adoption of such guidelines and that such OKR has a weight of 40%, which will also cause other OKRs to have a lower weigh.
Such task will get a Reach score of 5, because guidelines will become a company-wide resource, and a Confidence of 7, assuming that internal surveys made this emerged as a pain point.
When applying the Scale coefficient, you can observe that tasks with a high Scale score are more easily prioritized over tasks with a low one. However, Scale alone won’t be a game changer if delivering content guidelines is not part of your or your team’s objectives — it has to be in your OKRs. The OKRs’ weight will basically determine the amount of time you’ll spend focusing on the strategic goal that each OKR represents.
Conclusions
While this may seem like a lot of numbers and tables for someone who’s supposed to be passionate about words, I’m confident that prioritizing work in a more objective way will help you increase your value as a content designer.
At a minimum, mastering a prioritization framework should help you have better conversations with your team about what to work on or not work on. If you’re understaffed, it could also give you evidence to make a business case to increase headcount.
Did you decide to use this framework? I’d love to hear how it played out for you.
Are you a content designer who’s also passionate about product management? Get in touch and let’s keep nerding out about what other frameworks are applicable to content design.
Resources
Here’s a few additional resources if you want to learn more about Agile and Content Design:
- The official Scrum Guide (I also recommend the Reordered version by The Age of Product)
- Itamar Gilad’s website’s resources page for other hands-on guides on Agile processes and frameworks
- A Book Apart, the publisher of The Business Of UX Writing has many more incredible books on UX and content
- The UX Writing Library, a repository full of top-class content design and UX writing resources
- The Content Design Manifesto to understand what we do and how your organization can benefit from having content designers in the team
