Objective Prioritisation: BRICE

This is one of RoadmapOne’s articles on Objective Prioritisation frameworks .

RICE is brilliant at quantifying value per effort. Reach times Impact times Confidence divided by Effort produces comparable scores that surface high-value, low-effort wins. But RICE has a fatal blind spot: it assumes all value is equal. A feature reaching 10,000 users with high impact scores the same whether it advances critical business objectives or solves a problem nobody in leadership cares about. Enter BRICE—RICE plus Business Importance—which adds a fifth dimension forcing teams to explicitly score how much each objective matters to strategic goals before multiplying reach and impact.

Created by Kasey Kaplan to solve this exact problem, BRICE asks a simple question RICE ignores: “Does this objective align with what the business actually needs right now?” That customer-requested feature might reach 50% of users with high impact (great RICE score), but if the business is pivoting to enterprise and this is a consumer feature, Business Importance is 1 out of 3. The BRICE score drops accordingly, and the roadmap shifts toward strategic alignment instead of pure user impact.

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The Five Dimensions of BRICE

BRICE keeps RICE’s four dimensions—Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort—and adds Business Importance as a multiplier in the numerator. The formula becomes (Business Importance × Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort. High BRICE scores indicate objectives that reach many users, deliver meaningful impact, enjoy strong evidence, align with business strategy, and don’t consume excessive resources. Low scores flag work that fails on one or more dimensions.

Business Importance: Does This Actually Matter Strategically?

Business Importance scores how critical this objective is to the organisation’s current strategic priorities. Unlike Impact (which measures user-level benefit), Business Importance measures business-level necessity. It’s typically scored on a 1-3 scale: 3 means this objective is critical to the business’s current strategic phase (e.g., enterprise expansion, compliance, profitability), 2 means it supports business goals meaningfully, and 1 means it’s tangential or misaligned.

The power of Business Importance is forcing honesty about strategy. Teams habitually claim everything is “strategically important” because no one wants their project deprioritised. But when you limit the 3-score to genuinely critical objectives—maybe 20% of the backlog—teams must acknowledge that most work is supporting (2) or tangential (1). That acknowledgment aligns roadmaps with reality.

Business Importance changes quarterly. During a growth phase, user acquisition features score 3. During a profitability push, cost reduction scores 3 and feature bloat scores 1. During enterprise expansion, SMB features drop from 3 to 1 even if users love them. BRICE forces recalibration when business priorities shift—something RICE silently ignores.

The challenge with Business Importance is defining it. “Strategic alignment” is vague until leadership specifies: “This quarter, our business priorities are (1) enterprise deals over £100K ARR, (2) SOC 2 compliance, (3) reducing churn below 5%. Everything else is secondary.” With that clarity, scoring becomes objective. Without it, Business Importance collapses into politics.

Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort—Same as RICE

BRICE inherits RICE’s other four dimensions without modification. Reach quantifies how many users, customers, or transactions this objective affects. Impact measures magnitude of benefit per person. Confidence captures how much data supports your estimates. Effort quantifies person-months of work required.

These dimensions work exactly as they do in RICE. Reach might be “5,000 users per quarter.” Impact is scored on a 0.25× to 3× scale (Minimal to Massive). Confidence is 50-100% based on evidence quality. Effort is estimated in person-months or t-shirt sizes. The mechanics don’t change—BRICE just adds Business Importance as a strategic filter at the front.

The key difference is that BRICE’s numerator is now Business Importance × Reach × Impact × Confidence instead of Reach × Impact × Confidence. That multiplicative relationship means low Business Importance tanks your score even if Reach and Impact are stellar. A feature reaching 10,000 users with Massive Impact (3×) and High Confidence (100%) but scoring 1 on Business Importance gets cut to a third of its RICE score. Strategy matters.

The BRICE Formula in Action

The BRICE formula multiplies Business Importance into RICE’s numerator: (Business Importance × Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort. Let’s see how strategic alignment changes prioritisation.

Consider three objectives during an enterprise expansion phase where Business Importance is defined by “objectives that enable or accelerate enterprise deals over £100K ARR”:

Objective A: Enterprise SSO integration

• Business Importance: 3 (critical for enterprise deals—mandatory feature)
• Reach: 50 customers (enterprise segment)
• Impact: Massive (3×) (unblocks £2M+ in pipeline)
• Confidence: High (100%) (verified with 10 enterprise prospects)
• Effort: 6 person-months
• BRICE Score: (3 × 50 × 3 × 1) ÷ 6 = 75
• RICE Score (for comparison): (50 × 3 × 1) ÷ 6 = 25

Objective B: Mobile app dark mode

• Business Importance: 1 (consumer feature, not enterprise-relevant)
• Reach: 8,000 users (50% of MAU)
• Impact: Low (0.5×) (cosmetic improvement)
• Confidence: Medium (80%)
• Effort: 2 person-months
• BRICE Score: (1 × 8,000 × 0.5 × 0.8) ÷ 2 = 1,600
• RICE Score: (8,000 × 0.5 × 0.8) ÷ 2 = 1,600

Objective C: Advanced analytics dashboard for power users

• Business Importance: 2 (supports retention, somewhat relevant to enterprise)
• Reach: 1,200 users (power user segment)
• Impact: High (2×)
• Confidence: High (100%)
• Effort: 4 person-months
• BRICE Score: (2 × 1,200 × 2 × 1) ÷ 4 = 1,200
• RICE Score: (1,200 × 2 × 1) ÷ 4 = 600

Dark mode wins on pure RICE (1,600) because it reaches 8,000 users. But BRICE reveals the strategic picture: SSO’s Business Importance multiplier (3×) dramatically boosts its score despite low reach. The enterprise feature that RICE deprioritised becomes BRICE’s top priority because it’s critical to business goals. Meanwhile, dark mode’s BRICE score matches its RICE score (Business Importance = 1 acts as a neutral multiplier), and analytics gets a 2× boost because it supports strategy moderately.

This is BRICE’s power: it surfaces strategically critical work that RICE’s reach-focused formula would bury. When leadership says “we need enterprise deals,” BRICE ensures the roadmap reflects that priority quantitatively, not just rhetorically.

When BRICE Is Your Best Weapon

BRICE excels in three contexts. First, when business strategy is clear but roadmaps drift. Leadership declares “We’re pivoting to enterprise” or “Profitability is the only metric that matters this year,” but the roadmap still prioritises consumer features because RICE scores them highly. BRICE makes strategic drift visible—features misaligned with business goals score low automatically.

Second, when RICE produces counterintuitive results. If your RICE-ranked roadmap feels wrong—you’re shipping high-reach features that don’t move business KPIs—BRICE adds the missing dimension. Often, the discomfort comes from RICE optimising for user impact while business success requires something else (revenue, compliance, retention). BRICE aligns the two.

Third, when multiple product lines or customer segments compete for resources. Consumer features score high on Reach; enterprise features don’t. But if your business model depends on enterprise, RICE systematically starves it. BRICE’s Business Importance dimension lets you explicitly weight strategic segments, ensuring roadmap allocation matches revenue strategy.

When BRICE Betrays You

BRICE collapses in three scenarios. First, when leadership can’t define Business Importance. If strategy is vague (“we want growth and profitability and innovation and…”), scoring Business Importance becomes political theatre. Every PM claims their project is “strategically critical” (3), and the dimension adds noise, not signal. BRICE requires strategic clarity—which is rarer than organisations admit.

Second, when Business Importance becomes a political weapon. Executives learn that declaring their pet project “Business Importance = 3” pushes it to the top. Soon, leadership overrides multiply, and BRICE scores reflect org chart politics, not strategy. The fix is public criteria: “Business Importance 3 is reserved for objectives that directly enable this quarter’s board-level OKRs. Here are the three OKRs. Score accordingly.”

Third, when you’re pre-product-market-fit. Early-stage startups pivoting weekly don’t have stable business strategy. This week’s “critical priority” is next week’s abandoned experiment. BRICE demands strategic continuity that early-stage chaos doesn’t provide. Stick with ICE or Manual prioritisation until your strategy stabilises enough to score Business Importance consistently.

Practical Implementation

Start by defining Business Importance criteria with leadership. What are this quarter’s top 3 strategic priorities? Write them down. Examples: “Enterprise deals over £100K ARR,” “SOC 2 compliance,” “Reduce monthly churn below 5%,” “Achieve profitability by reducing infrastructure costs.” Those priorities define what scores 3 on Business Importance.

Establish the 1-3 scale explicitly:

• 3: This objective directly enables or accelerates one of our top 3 strategic priorities
• 2: This objective supports strategic priorities meaningfully but isn’t critical
• 1: This objective is valuable to users but tangential to current business strategy

Score your backlog using BRICE dimensions. Gather product, engineering, and executive leads. For each objective, score Business Importance (1-3), then score Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort as you would for RICE. Calculate BRICE scores by multiplying the first four and dividing by Effort.

Sort by BRICE score and compare to your previous RICE ranking. Watch how strategic alignment shifts priorities. That enterprise feature RICE buried at rank 37 might jump to rank 5 with BRICE. That consumer feature RICE ranked #2 might drop to #15 because Business Importance is 1. The delta reveals how much your RICE roadmap drifted from business strategy.

Draw the capacity line and fund high-BRICE objectives first. But explicitly flag strategic overrides: if you’re funding a low-BRICE objective because it’s a Quick Win or tactical necessity, tag it as such. BRICE should dominate roadmap sequencing, but tactical flexibility still matters.

Re-score quarterly when business priorities shift. Last quarter’s enterprise focus (Business Importance = 3) might become this quarter’s retention focus (Business Importance = 3 for churn reduction). Continuous recalibration keeps BRICE aligned with current strategy, not stale OKRs.

BRICE and Strategic Honesty

BRICE is RICE for teams who discovered their roadmaps optimised for user impact while the business needed something else. It forces explicit scoring of strategic alignment, ensuring high-reach features that don’t serve business goals get deprioritised quantitatively, not just in vague leadership complaints.

But BRICE is only as good as your strategic clarity. If leadership can’t articulate this quarter’s top priorities, Business Importance scoring collapses into politics. If strategy shifts weekly, BRICE scores churn uselessly. And if executives weaponise Business Importance to force pet projects through, the framework becomes theatre.

RoadmapOne makes BRICE visible at portfolio scale. Score Business Importance alongside RICE dimensions, calculate BRICE scores, and watch strategically aligned work rise to the top. When the CEO asks why you’re building consumer features during enterprise expansion, you don’t defend—you point at BRICE scores and say “Here’s what the data says matters strategically. Let’s confirm our Business Importance criteria.”

BRICE won’t fix unclear strategy—no framework can. But when strategy is clear and roadmaps drift anyway, BRICE is the quantitative anchor that pulls prioritisation back to business reality. Use it when RICE feels right technically but wrong strategically, and watch alignment emerge.

Your roadmap should serve the business, not just users. BRICE makes that alignment measurable, visible, and defensible. Score Business Importance explicitly, multiply it into RICE, and let strategy win.

For more on Objective Prioritisation frameworks, see our comprehensive guide .