Developing the N.I.C.E.R. Framework & Rethinking the Costs of Innovation
Disrupt & Conquer #4
Hey, friends! 👋
Whilst it's been a productive month, I can't help but reflect on how recent political events have made me think deeply about values and perspective. I'm still developing my confidence to articulate these thoughts eloquently, and I'm focusing on strengthening my critical thinking. For now, I'll keep my focus clear and specific, but I wanted to be transparent about what's been on my mind lately. This means exploring topics beyond the usual 'business domain' which we'll explore below.
In this issue I'm excited to share the product frameworks I've been developing for next year's roadmap, our launch with MHBS, and a role I'm hiring for this month.
Welcome to the fourth edition of my monthly newsletter, "Disrupt and Conquer"!
Benji
The N.I.C.E.R Framework
Over the last few months I’ve been shaping out a framework for building a product roadmap, it’s a cocktail of a few other tried and tested frameworks like the ICE prioritisation, KPIs and the scientific method. The NICER framework comprises of 5 key pillars, I’ll give an overview in this issue and hope to go into more depth in future.
Needs . Indicators . Concepts . Experiments . Ranking
Needs
Every concept that enters our roadmap must originate from an identifiable need. Often, the conversation veers solely toward user and customer needs, but business needs are equally critical. For instance, at Doshi, we have a strategic business need to cut customer onboarding time by 75% to accommodate an increase in incoming clients. This need holds as much significance as many user-centric goals we aim to fulfil.
Identify and Map Dependencies: We personally structure our process by documenting the needs of the business, customers, and users—often observing their interdependencies. We map out these dependencies to highlight which needs are blocking others. For example, we’ve discovered that user engagement with our app is partially reliant on the notifications we send. However, with suboptimal delivery and open rates and with inadequate tracking, it becomes challenging to evaluate this data accurately. So there’s three interconnected needs here: a need for increased user engagement, a need for higher notification engagement rates and a need for better quality notification tracking. There are times when user needs cannot be prioritised until the underlying technical or business infrastructure needs are in place.
Each need should be assigned a base impact score reflecting its level of importance. I’ve built an equation to measure the impact of needs with their dependencies:
Adjusted Impact Score = Base Impact Score + (Average of Dependency Impact Scores) / 2
Here’s what our Needs Library looks like on Notion. You can see the categorisation, identification of dependancies and our impact formulas.
Indicators
Quantification is crucial in most aspects of what we do; how can we determine when a need has been fulfilled?
Are there any benchmarks we can reference to guide us in assessing whether a need is met?
Concepts
These are the broad ideas that could help address the needs identified earlier. Think of them as 'epics'—ambitious ideas that, if fully realised, might take months to develop.
For instance, a key need our users have is to reduce their overconsumption, boost their financial mindfulness, and promote healthier financial habits. One concept we think could help achieve this could be integrating open banking and creating an anonymised community of users who can compare their savings rates with those of others with similar incomes or in their local area. However, this is an extensive idea that could take at least a year to implement in its ideal form, and we cannot rush into such an idea based solely on a whim or assumption.
Assess your confidence.
’s blog on the confidence meter is an excellent resource for quantifying your belief in an idea. Establish an initial confidence score that changes as you complete higher-impact experiments outlined below. This approach helps you systematically adjust your confidence level based on new insights and results over time. For more details, you can refer to his guide here.
Experiments
As mentioned earlier, concepts are ambitious, multi-month ideas that we believe can address our needs.
The next step is to create experiments that act as ‘gates’ we need to unlock to build both confidence and evidence for the idea while also progressing the actual development without fully committing a multi month roll out.
This approach blends the principles of MVP (the popular image of a skateboard evolving into a car is a great visual representation of this) and the scientific method, which has been extensively discussed in many other sources. You can learn more about product experiments and designing effective ones here. For insights into using the scientific method in product development, check out this blog post.
Ranking
The final step is ranking our experiments. First, ensure that each concept is linked to a specific need.
We will use the ICE prioritisation method, which multiplies Impact, Confidence, and Ease to generate a priority score.
Impact Score: Take the impact score from your needs library, divide it by the highest impact score across all needs, and then multiply it by 10 to normalise it.
Ease Score: Start by determining the 'effort' score (not to be confused with ease) for each experiment. This score estimates how difficult it will be to run the experiment and get meaningful results. We use Fibonacci points (1, 2, 3, 5, 8), with a team capacity of around 40 points per week for a 2.5-person team (16 points per person). This helps you estimate how long an experiment will take and how much time is needed to fully develop a concept by summing up the effort scores of all experiments involved.
Since the 'E' in ICE stands for Ease, and a higher score means it's easier, we need to convert the effort score into an ease score. To do this, simply invert the effort score by dividing 10 by the effort value. This ensures the higher the Ease score, the simpler it is to execute the experiment.
Confidence Score: Use the confidence score you previously set for each idea or concept, which is scored out of 10.
Finally, organise the ranked list of experiments into a roadmap. Using the Fibonacci sequence, you can gauge team capacity and identify where experiments fit into different cycles.
I can dive deeper into our ranking and prioritisation process another time, but for now, this is the N.I.C.E.R framework in a nutshell.
There's still plenty to refine, but I look forward to sharing more about how it’s been beneficial and the ways I’ve adapted it in future updates.
The Balance of Sacrifice, Innovation, and Values: Lessons from Elon Musk
I’ve been reading more heavily recently and just finished Scaling Lean, Algorithms We Live By, and You’re About To Make A Terrible Mistake. I’ll touch on my key takeaways from these in next month's newsletter.
A book that feels especially relevant this month, given the recent election, is Elon Musk’s biography. This is particularly timely considering the significant role he played in Trump’s recent victory.
Musk seems to set such high demands for himself and others, expecting those around him to make sacrifices for the sake of innovation. I sense an unwillingness in society to sacrifice our comforts for the sake of the long-term innovation of our society, partly because of the discomfort involved particularly the strain it causes on relationships and the loneliness it creates. The creation of those relationships requires a form of sacrifice and selflessness in itself which I think Musk fails to recognise and I think if pressed, Musk would argue that how you make others feel through your values is less significant than how you inspire them to act through your creations. So, the real question we need to ask ourselves is: What is the true impact we want to have on the world—through our values or through our actions?
Often, people are confused as being what might be called an “NPC” or Non-Playable Character, a term frequently used as an insult for someone who lacks agency and lets their brain continue on the treadmill to a destination they’re not questioning, without taking any aggressive U-turns or diversions that would lead to change, innovation, or creation.
Maybe Musk felt the need to counterbalance the growing unwillingness in the world to sacrifice for innovation with such an extreme approach. If we were all more willing to sacrifice moderately for innovation and demand more from ourselves and others, perhaps we wouldn’t need such an extreme version of Elon Musk, who swings too far toward innovation at the expense of our relationships.
Let me say this, though: using the NPC analogy, games would be less enriched without NPCs creating that supporting role. The same can be said for real life—it would be less enriched without them, too, as they play such an important role. As for whether you yourself are an NPC, know that collectively, NPCs are necessary. If everyone were the main character, society would devolve into Fortnite Battle Royale chaos, each person fighting for their own selfish interests.
I think my takeaway was this: In the end, whether we choose to lead like Musk or support like an NPC, the balance between sacrifice, innovation, and values shapes the direction of our society. It’s a question we all must confront: How do we want to contribute to the world around us? And there is no single way to contribute, nor a single way to measure that impact, no matter how it’s framed by society.
In Other Doshi News…
We’ve been nominated for the following awards, we’ll let you know next month if we’ve won any:
We launched this week with Market Harborough Building Society, it’s been really interesting to figure out the future role that mutual institutions play especially given their more community-focused role in society.
We’re growing at Doshi and we’re hiring 3 new people over the next few months. Particularly looking for help with this first hire here. I’ll share my hiring playbook I’ve been building as I hire for my first role at Doshi in the next newsletter.
Congratulations to…
Congratulations to Kevin Kyer on being nominated for Slush100, making it to the top 50! I’ll be heading to Helsinki for Slush next week and can’t wait to see if Kevin pitches for the top spot!
Very proud of Joshua Peters for being recognised by Legal500, a notable legal directory that highlights leading legal professionals and firms.
Congrats as well toHasan Sukkar and the 11X teamfor securing a $20M Series A funding led by Benchmark Capital and for recently opening their next office in San Francisco. I was about a day away from posting, and they’ve only gone and secured a $50M Series B, from a16z, impressive stuff!Lastly, congratulations to Anat Blanc at Revyze, often called the “TikTok for education,” for their $6M seed round from Speedinvest, Moonfire, and Motier.
Fantasy Fund Spotlight & Just Debate
There's no fantasy fund spotlight this week, as this blog ended up being quite a long read. I’ll be back with a spotlight next month. I’ll also be sharing my updates on Just Debate next month too.
Have a great week everyone.
I’ll be back in your inbox next month.
Thanks for reading
Benji
Love this one!