Google Ventures' design and startup team writes about OKRs, design sprints, branding, and product metrics.
Commenters link its OKR article as a practical model, though one says it was more useful than John Doerr's book, and another discusses its design-and-code piece.
It's not clear if the biggest problem you have is 1. potential users / customers not understanding what problem you solve, 2. that the problem isn't one of their big problems, 3. that your user onboarding needs to be improved, or 4. that their current solutions are satisfactory or 5 something else. Identify it, focus on it, try things related to it.
You are likely a member of your target market - how and why would you talk to a random person or company about some problem or product?
Customer feedback is a combination of analytics, conversation, and observation. You are already getting some!
Talk with users, potential users, and people that leave and find out why. However your users want to be talked to (consider in person, conferences, video chat, differently worded or timed email, chat in the website, surveys, possibly but probably not the phone given the audience). Turn the random text based messages into bigger conversations.
Observe people using your website, signing up to use your product, using your product. What works great? What can be improved?
For getting customer feedback, look into user research and user interviews. This might involve giving people incentives e.g. gift cards to participate.
Read The Mom Test. Short summary here: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test
Other resources:
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-research-cheat-sheet/
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/
- How to do a user research…
I disagree with you on "Measure What Matters" book. I was really looking forward to reading John Doerr's book, and I stuck along with it longer than usual, but had to ultimately abandon it before hitting the 100-page mark. It seems that just reading GV's blog post[1] on OKR's will teach you as much as reading the whole book.
In addition, the book is one content chapter, followed by a few success stories chapters written by founders themselves. These chapters are written in a very uninspired tone (almost as if they wanted to write something and get it done for JD, not because they wanted to share their story) and barely inspire you or bring in any new insights over the meatier content chapters.
This is not a criticism of the OKR system — arguably it's one of the best goal setting systems out there. But does it need a whole book to understand? I think not. It just seems to be a vastly missed opportunity to me. John Doerr is pretty much a legend in the valley, and maybe my expectations were sky high hoping for a book on the same level as High Output Management or Hard Things About Hard Things.
[1]: https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72c7
It doesn't take away from this, but because of the title: Google Docs started much like this, but eventually they gave up on plain HTML and changed to the current model which still uses the DOM but is "complicated"(tm) HTML.
I can't find the link at the moment, but I think it's interesting because despite it being the simple solution, they eventually realized it was holding back adoption amongst business users.
Edit: Found the article: "Babe Ruth and Feature Lists" [0] where former Google PDM Ken Norton writes:
>We were relying on the browser’s rich text surface, which used HTML as the underlying data format and caused browser compatibility nightmares. You’d bold a word and then be unable to un-bold it. Bulleted lists couldn’t be edited or deleted without screwing up the whole page or turning everything into a bullet. Centering a line would often center-align the entire document. Formatting bugs had been an annoyance for Googlers, but they were fatal for groups of students who needed to print a term paper to a teacher’s exacting specifications.
0 - https://library.gv.com/babe-ruth-and-feature-lists-1818bb8c6ca8#.sq8086m2t
This rings true, and will be useful to introspect and more clearly explain concerns to colleagues. Apart from the short article[1] linked from the submission, are there similar pieces written from the POV of a manager or designer?
Aside: Pretty sure most managers at my job already understand most of what this article is saying. I count my lucky stars, and I'll be sure to remind them that this is a huge reason why a lot of us stick around. Just as the article reminds us to recognize the engineers, we must also recognize when i.e. managers do something positive for their team.
Also, on thanking engineers: If you see an engineer do something to help other engineers, recognize them or, better, help them. It really stings when, say, you spend a frustrating afternoon debugging obtuse test scaffolding code that's been affecting multiple teams, only to get nothing beyond a quick "looks good" review.
[1] The link is broken but there appears to be a copy at https://library.gv.com/how-designers-and-engineers-can-play-nice-and-still-run-with-scissors-8df20e65c2c1
I don't think the article is advocating that that designers can just code up some HTML and CSS as a substitute for FE devs. Specialists are necessary, but so are people who can span disciplines, like designers who can do some HTML and CSS. https://chiefexecutive.net/ideo-ceo-tim-brown-t-shaped-stars-the-backbone-of-ideoaes-collaborative-culture__trashed/ If the designer codes up his design, finds problems, and makes improvements, that's time saved for the FE engineer, and eliminates some conflicts like https://library.gv.com/why-you-should-move-that-button-3px-to-the-left-c012e5ad32f7 It's also faster for the FE engineer to start with working code as opposed to a Sketch or Zeplin document.
Having said that, maybe you're responding to one part of the article, and I'm responding to another, so we're talking past each other.
You can apply the concept of OKRs [0] for this. Think Objectives as your long term goals and Key Results as your routine tasks. When you pick a daily task you should be able to point to the objective it'd satisfy.
I've been ignoring it thinking it's corporate BS and doesn't really apply to personal life. But I tried it in last year (where I quit my day job to bootstrap my own startup) and felt having a systematic thinking is actually productive.
[0] https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72c7#.nlpxbxyo4