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:

1. Interview and observe customers in a way that gets to their articulated and unarticulated needs

2. Test product concepts, in an interview setting, with approaches that yield a wealth of unbiased information to guide new product development

3. 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!