A founder hears requests from customers, team members and stakeholders, each with a reason their idea should come next. Agreeing is often easier than explaining why the work should wait. The cost appears later, when the team has too many priorities and little progress toward the business goal.
Carlos uses this Designli Academy lesson to connect the discipline of saying no with a concrete feature prioritization method: RICE. The method gives teams a shared way to discuss reach, impact, confidence and effort before committing resources.
What you'll learn.
- Separate the loudest request from the work most likely to create customer value.
- Compare features using reach, impact, confidence and effort, making uncertainty visible.
- Use the resulting scores to decide what goes first and what should be pushed back.
Account for what each yes commits the team to.
The pressure to say yes comes from several directions. A customer wants a feature, a stakeholder wants a change, and the team has its own ideas. Carlos opens by acknowledging how difficult it can be for a founder to say no in those conversations.
A request also carries work beyond the enthusiasm behind it. Later in the lesson, he identifies investment, development hours and implementation hours as possible costs. Repeating the same decisions while expecting different business results is a reason to reconsider how those commitments are made.
Prioritization gives the founder something more useful than a personal preference to bring to the discussion. The question becomes how a request compares with the other work the company could choose.
Compare the four inputs in RICE.
RICE combines four questions about a proposed feature or solution. Each exposes a different part of the decision.
- Reach: How many users or clients do you expect the work to affect?
- Impact: How much will it affect the customer's experience?
- Confidence: How certain are you that the reach and impact estimates are accurate?
- Effort: What investment, development time or implementation time will the work require?
Discuss the estimates before treating them as facts.
Reach begins as an assumption about how many people a feature will affect. Impact is more subjective. Product and sales may have different views of the same request, so Carlos recommends a collaborative conversation focused on customer value.
For the exercise shown in this lesson, he suggests agreeing on impact using a scale from one to five. The purpose is to make the difference in people's expectations discussable instead of letting each department quietly use its own definition.
Confidence makes that uncertainty explicit. A large estimated audience and a large expected impact still rest on projections. Adding confidence asks the team how much trust it should place in those numbers before using them to set a priority.
Calculate a score that includes the cost.
The formula shown is reach multiplied by impact multiplied by confidence, divided by effort. Effort belongs in the denominator because a proposal has to be considered alongside the resources needed to deliver it.
The slide illustrates this with anonymous features. One has a reach of 100, an impact score of five, 60% confidence and an effort score of three. That produces a RICE score of 100. Another has a reach of 90, impact of four, 60% confidence and effort of four, producing a score of 54.
These are examples from the presentation, not predictions for your product. They show how comparing the inputs creates an ordered discussion, and why the feature with enthusiastic support still needs an effort estimate.
Use the ranking to decide what waits.
Carlos closes by putting the highest-ranking features first and moving lower-ranking work back. That connects the calculation to the decision the founder faced at the beginning: what deserves a yes now, and what should wait.
A practical way to apply the lesson is to bring competing requests into the same discussion, agree on the inputs, and make the assumptions visible beside the scores. This keeps the conversation tied to customer experience and the cost of delivery.
Saying no becomes easier to explain when the team can see how an idea compares with the alternatives. RICE provides that shared comparison so the roadmap reflects a deliberate use of the company's time and money.
