Insightful Customer Interviews for Product Managers

In this lecture, we describe the four key skills of interviewing: compassion & empathy, preparation, focus, and openness.

In this lecture, we introduce an example interview for meal planning and the NYT Cooking app.

This lecture is an example interview with a user of the NYT Cooking app. Key interviewing skills are flagged.

Practice interview with friends or relatives to ask about DNA testing, and discuss what ancestry means to them.

In this lecture, we talk about the importance of asking lots of open-ended questions (and avoiding too many closed-ended questions).

Ratings and rankings are useful in interviews to set the stage for deeper discussion.

We talk about projective techniques in this lecture - a great way to solicit emotions and unmet needs.

Laddering techniques help us to move up from basic needs & benefits to higher-level needs & benefits.

We talk about ethnography in this lecture - the uninterrupted observation of people using your product.

In this activity, we focus on the appropriateness of different question types during customer interviews.

Practice interviews with friends and colleagues about one of their favorite apps, like Instagram, WhatsApp, Line, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

We talk about determining our learning objectives - as a simple first step with customer interviews

We talk about creating an interview guide in this lecture.

Let's practice creating an interview guide (using our template)

In this lecture, we talk about how (and where) to find respondents.

We talk about inviting respondents, scheduling interviews, and compensating (or not) your respondents. We also give an example of Timberland Pro.

Let's think through how we would recruit respondents for Wag!

We talk about how to manage overly talkative, overly quiet, and impatient or angry respondents.

We'll discuss face-to-face interviews and video conferencing interviews, and we will also look at platforms that we can use for online interviews.

This lecture introduces the upcoming interview for Microsoft's Flipgrid.

This lecture is an example Zoom interview with a school administrator who uses Microsoft's Flipgrid.

Let's talk through how to interview together with your colleagues: product designers, engineers, sales reps

We'll talk through overcoming internal objections to product managers doing these types of interviews.

To frame our product concept testing discussion - let's talk through a new product development approach called "discovery & delivery".

We look at rules 1-3 for effective product concept testing in customer interviews.

We look at rules 4-6 for effective product concept testing in customer interviews.

In this practice activity, we mentor a product manager using customer interviews to test new dashboard concepts

We talk about using printouts to test product concepts during customer interviews.

Let's try a practice interview using a printout concept of your product (or using a Netflix example)

In this lecture, we look at using video to test product concepts in interviews

We'll discuss using advanced prototypes (like clickable prototypes, 3D models, etc.) to generate feedback and insight.

We use Timberland Pro clothing as a case study for testing advanced prototypes with customers.

We talk through an overall game plan for testing product concepts, and use an example with Next Insurance

In this lecture, we'll look at getting insights from each interview, and will discuss mindmapping.

In this practice activity, we will create a mindmap from the earlier NYT Cooking application interview.

We describe how to create an interview summary with this lecture, and offer a template to do this.

In this lecture, we talk about capturing insight across multiple interviews.

We describe one of our advanced techniques - the Kano model - to generate customer insight.

In this practice activity, we separate needs of Ancestry's users into the three Kano model categories.

We'll look at converting what we learned in customer interviews into a benefit tree - laddering from lower level to higher level benefits of our products, and using this to refine our messages to different target audiences. We'll use the startup Amber Kinetics as an example.

In this lecture, we'll discuss using our insights from interviews to guide strategy, new product development, and finding growth for our products.

In this lecture, we spell out ten next steps - concrete things you, as a product manager, can start doing tomorrow (or today).

We wrap the course in this lecture.