RICE Scoring for Linear Teams

What is RICE?

RICE is a prioritization framework developed by Intercom that evaluates work using four dimensions:

• Reach — How many users or customers will this affect over a given period?
• Impact — How much value does it create for each person reached?
• Confidence — How confident are you in your estimates?
• Effort — How much work is required to deliver it?

The formula is:

RICE Score = (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort

The score isn't meaningful by itself. Its purpose is to compare issues that have been evaluated using the same assumptions.

A worked example

Imagine you're deciding between three issues in your Linear backlog.

• Bulk CSV Export — Reach 400, Impact 1, Confidence 80%, Effort 1 month. RICE Score: 320.
• Redesign Onboarding — Reach 1,200, Impact 2, Confidence 50%, Effort 3 months. RICE Score: 400.
• Fix Rare Timezone Bug — Reach 20, Impact 3, Confidence 100%, Effort 0.25 month. RICE Score: 240.

Although the onboarding redesign takes three times longer than the CSV export, its much higher reach gives it the highest score.

Meanwhile, the timezone bug affects relatively few customers, but because it's inexpensive to fix, it still ranks higher than many teams might expect.

This is exactly why many product teams like RICE — it encourages decisions based on multiple factors instead of intuition alone.

Where RICE works well

RICE is particularly effective when:

• You're prioritizing customer-facing features.
• You have reasonably reliable usage or customer data.
• Multiple initiatives compete for engineering time.
• Your team wants a consistent, repeatable decision-making process.

It gives everyone a shared language for discussing tradeoffs instead of relying purely on opinion.

Where RICE becomes challenging

Like every prioritization framework, RICE depends on the quality of its inputs.

Some questions can be difficult to answer consistently:

• How many customers will this really reach?
• How confident should we be in that estimate?
• How do we score platform improvements or technical debt?
• How should compliance or infrastructure work be compared with new features?

For many teams, especially B2B SaaS companies, estimating Reach and Confidence accurately is often the hardest part of using RICE.

The biggest challenge isn't the formula

In practice, the hardest part of prioritization usually isn't calculating the score.

It's agreeing on the inputs.

A product manager, engineer, customer success manager, salesperson, and executive may all evaluate the same issue differently.

Those different perspectives are valuable.

They highlight assumptions, reveal missing information, and lead to better prioritization discussions.

The goal isn't identical scores.

The goal is informed consensus.

Linear stores priorities — it doesn't calculate them

Linear provides excellent tools for organizing work once priorities have been decided.

You can:

• assign priorities
• sort and filter by priority
• group issues
• plan cycles
• build roadmaps

What Linear doesn't do is determine whether an issue should be Urgent, High, or Medium.

That decision still belongs to your team.

A different approach to prioritization

RICE is one proven framework, but it isn't the only way to prioritize work.

CoJii uses a structured scoring model designed around the factors product teams evaluate during planning.

Customer & Business Value

These dimensions answer "Why should we build this?"

• Impact — How much value does this create for the business or customer?
• Customer Signal — How strongly are customers asking for it?

Delivery

These dimensions answer "How practical is it to build?"

• Effort — How much work is required?
• Readiness — Is the issue ready to begin?

Strategy

This dimension answers "Does it move us in the right direction?"

• Strategic Alignment — How well does this support company goals?

Rather than estimating customer reach or assigning confidence percentages, CoJii focuses on dimensions that product teams can evaluate consistently during backlog refinement and roadmap planning.

ICE vs RICE: how do they compare?

RICE is closely related to ICE — a simpler framework that scores issues across Impact, Confidence, and Ease without the Reach dimension. ICE works well when you don't have reliable user data or when speed of evaluation matters more than precision.

RICE is better suited to teams with measurable reach data who need to compare features affecting very different numbers of users. If estimating reach accurately is difficult in your context — common in B2B SaaS, platform work, or early-stage products — ICE or a broader multi-dimension framework may produce more consistent results.

See the ICE vs RICE comparison guide for a side-by-side breakdown of both frameworks with a worked example.

How CoJii fits in

CoJii helps product teams make prioritization decisions collaboratively before assigning priorities in Linear.

With CoJii, your team can:

• Import issues directly from Linear.
• Score issues using a structured, opinionated framework.
• Invite teammates and stakeholders to contribute — even if they don't have a Linear account.
• Compare where people agree and where opinions differ.
• Aggregate scores automatically.
• Sync the final priorities back into Linear with a single click.

Linear remains your system of record.

CoJii helps your team decide what deserves the highest priority.