Insightful Customer Interviews for Product Managers
What you'll learn
- Interview and observe customers in a way that gets to the heart of their articulated and unarticulated needs
- Test product concepts, in a customer interview setting, with approaches that yield a wealth of unbiased information to guide product development
- Analyze customer needs to derive insight to guide product strategy, new product development, and your search for growth
Requirements
- A basic understanding of product management
Description
A deep, intuitive customer understanding powers all our work as product managers - from strategy to new product development to our search for growth. Surveys, product usage data, AB tests - they all help us understand our customers, but our best tool (by far) is direct interviews with real customers.
These in-depth interviews - either in-person or via video conferencing - help us understand our customers' needs, motivations, and hopes. They connect us to (quoting Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos) the "heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste" of a remarkable customer journey.
And these interviews give us a chance to test our product concepts, refining and retesting them until we find true customer value.
Given the critical importance of these interviews, you would think we would all be good at these. But these interviews are tough to get right - it is challenging for all of us to get deep, unbiased insight out of these interviews. We need techniques, skills, and practice.
This course is designed to give you these skills. Specifically, we'll help you develop the skills you need to:
Interview and observe customers in a way that gets to their articulated and unarticulated needs
Test product concepts, in an interview setting, with approaches that yield a wealth of unbiased information to guide new product development
Analyze customer needs for insight to guide strategy, new product development, and your search for growth
We'll do this with a set of engaging lectures, company examples, tools, templates, and practice activities.
We hope you will join us!
Who this course is for:
- Product managers who want improve their customer interview and product concept testing skills
Course content
5 lectures • 20minIntroduction
- Preview05:32
- Preview04:57
- Preview06:19
- 01:03Practice Activity: San Francisco startup KeepTruckin
- 02:02Practice Activity: Self-assessment of interview skills
- 3 questionsIntroduction
11 lectures • 49minInterviewing skills
12 lectures • 1hr 11minConducting the interview
10 lectures • 1hr 3minProduct concept testing
8 lectures • 43minAnalyzing for insight
2 lectures • 8minCourse wrap-up
Instructors
![Todd Birzer](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64"%3E%3C/svg%3E){kind=avatar}
- 4.5 Instructor Rating
- 5,039 Reviews
- 41,234 Students
- 2 Courses
Todd Birzer helps product management teams become more strategic, and have a greater impact on their organizations.
Working as a product management director, or an external consultant, Todd helps product management teams:
Gain a deeper understanding of articulated and unarticulated customer needs
Develop long-term product strategies for customer delight and competitive advantage
Run an effective “discovery and delivery” product development process
Systematically find growth and profitability for a company’s products
Todd is the author of Becoming a More Strategic Product Manager (available on Amazon). He is a principal consultant at Kevolve Product Management, and has an MBA from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania.
- 4.2 Instructor Rating
- 13 Reviews
- 57 Students
- 1 Course
I have 30+ years of experience listening to customers as varied as construction workers and surgeons. For the past 12 years I have operated as an independent consultant to clients in a broad range of industries; prior to that, I served in senior research positions at several boutique research firms in New England. I'm curious by nature, open to learning, interested in people, and a natural organizer of chaos.