Implementing RICE in Trello

At Laravel we use Trello to store all of the ideas we come up with and also any suggestions that are sent to us.

Recently, Taylor shared an article about RICE with the team and we could immediately see the benefits. RICE is described as:

Simple prioritization for product managers

Essentially, by scoring four different factors, you can calculate a score that you use to determine how important the feature is.

Reach: how many people will this impact? (Estimate within a defined time period.)

Impact: how much will this impact each person? (Massive = 3x, High = 2x, Medium = 1x, Low = 0.5x, Minimal = 0.25x.)

Confidence: how confident are you in your estimates? (High = 100%, Medium = 80%, Low = 50%.)

Effort: how many “person-months” will this take? (Use whole numbers and minimum of half a month – don’t get into the weeds of estimation.)

Now, having recently planned for the arrival of our baby and wedding using Trello, I'm a self-described Trello nerd. When used properly, Trello can become a super-power, especially when you're using with Butler enabled.

After reading the article, I was immediately drawn to whether we could build this into Trello. If you haven't guessed already, the answer is yes, you can.

To implement this yourself, you must have the Butler and Custom Fields powerups available and enabled.

Custom Fields

Before we can calculate the RICE score, we need to be able to enter the individual scores. To do this, I created five fields:

  • Reach - This should be a Number field.
  • Impact - This should be a Dropdown field with the options; 3, 2, 1, 0.50, 0.25. I also coloured the options; green, yellow, orange, red and black.
  • Confidence - This should be a Dropdown field with the options; 100, 80, 50, 20. Again, I coloured these; green, yellow, orange and red.
  • Effort - This should be a Number field.
  • RICE Score - This should be a Number field. I also checked the Show field on front of card option so that it's quickly visible without needing to open the card.

Butler

We can now calculate the RICE score. To do this we use a custom Butler Card Button with an action that sets the custom field RICE Score to:

{{%Reach}}*{{%Impact}}*{{%Confidence}}/{{%Effort}}

Done!

And that's it, we can now see the RICE score for a task on the front of a card, just by providing the individual scores.

If you wanted to, you could take this further by using more of the features available in Butler, such as sorting by score, auto-labelling priorities based on the calculated RICE score and more!

I'd love to know if you're using this in your Trello boards, so please tweet me @jbrooksuk.