Understanding User Needs brings the student into the core of user-centred product management, teaching methodologies and strategies to decipher the communication with users. Students are equipped with the knowledge and skills to identify user needs, align product strategies, and highlight key product components required for tailor-making digital solutions that resonate with the target audience. The ability to deeply connect with users, anticipate their desires, and address their pain points is at the core of the course. Students learn to explore how the product is utilised in real-world scenarios, the pivotal role a product plays in a user's life and how it fulfils specific functions, and how to use such information to fine-tune features and functionality. 

Students gain the ability to pinpoint a target audience and understand their unique characteristics, desires, and pain points. They also learn how to position a product as the solution to the user's "job to be done", how to conduct effective customer interviews, and employ other ethnographic methods to uncover unserved user needs and challenges. 

Students are further taught methods in data analysis, and how data is used to shape our understanding of user needs and preferences. They learn how to gain valuable insights and verify both the validity of the sources and the quality of the information itself. The students learn to grasp the nuances between qualitative and quantitative research methods, how they complement each other and when to use each approach. The course develops the students’ skills to prioritise user needs and problems strategically, and to identify which issues to tackle first, aligning with the product's overall vision and goals. 

The course gives a deeper understanding of the importance of user needs, briefly explored in the introductory course. It gives the student the relevant and necessary foundation for developing digital products aligned with user needs in the coming courses of the programme.