Product Discovery, Analytics, & Customer Insights

Catalog description

In the product development journey, the first (and the most important) step is product discovery, i.e., acquiring a clear understanding of a product opportunity. This requires product managers to not just identify the potential customer (market) but also derive non-obvious insights on customer needs or the 'job-to-be-done'. Such insights could then be used to build a first-level product concept that matches with the market opportunity. This course will focus on key frameworks and techniques that product managers (and product development teams) can employ to (a) analyze and define the broad market problem, (b) conduct an in-depth customer needs analysis, and (c) formulate and test an initial product concept. The course will emphasize a diverse range of data sources to study customer needs -- from qualitative techniques to quantitative techniques. For example, social media and other digital platforms form an important venue to gather and analyze data on customer desires, behaviors, and needs. Similarly, analysis of user behaviors on existing products (product analytics) forms another important vehicle to acquire insights on future customer needs. Thus, in this course, we will consider how different data analytic techniques (relating to both small data and big data) afford deriving rich insights on customer behaviors and needs and how such insights could be converted into an effective product concept.