Products fail not because engineers ship bad code but because PMs solve the wrong problem. Today you learn the research methods that find the right problem before a single line of code is written.
By the end of this lesson you will conduct a structured user interview, apply the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to surface real motivations, synthesize interview notes into a validated problem statement, and distinguish user problems from user requests.
user interviews is the foundation of Day 1. Every concept that follows builds on the mental model you establish here. The most effective approach is to understand the principle first, then apply it — skipping straight to implementation creates gaps that compound into confusion later.
Work through each example in this lesson sequentially. The concepts connect, and the order is deliberate. If something is unclear, slow down at that point rather than pushing past it — a ten-minute pause now saves hours of debugging later.
Understanding user interviews requires seeing it in motion. The code below is not a complete application — it is a minimal, working illustration of the key mechanism. Study the pattern, run it, break it deliberately, then fix it. That cycle builds real comprehension.
Once the basic pattern works, the logical next step is Jobs-to-be-Done. This is where the abstraction becomes useful — you move from understanding the mechanism to applying it to real problems. The transition is usually smaller than it feels. Most of the hard work happened in Section 1.
problem definition completes today's picture. It is where user interviews and Jobs-to-be-Done converge into a pattern you can apply to novel problems. This integration step is often where the day's learning consolidates — if the earlier sections felt abstract, this one typically makes them click.
Implementing user interviews alone handles the happy path. Real systems encounter edge cases, invalid input, and unexpected state. Missing Jobs-to-be-Done means missing those guards.
Combining user interviews with Jobs-to-be-Done gives you a complete, defensible implementation. The extra lines cost ten minutes; the robustness they add is worth hours of debugging time.
Several mistakes appear consistently when engineers encounter Discovery & User Research for the first time. Recognizing them now costs nothing; encountering them in production costs hours.
Two intensive days (Thu–Fri) with an instructor who has taught thousands of engineers. Cohorts in 5 cities, June–June–October 2026 (Thu–Fri).
Reserve Your Seat — $1,490Before moving on, you should be able to answer these without looking: