CIRCLES Method

Who invented the CIRCLES Method? 

The CIRCLES method came from the mind of Lewis C. Lin, one of the go-to Product Leaders for advice and insight on anything career and interview-focused.

As the author of two books focused on getting PMs hired (The Product Manager Interview and Decode and Conquer), naturally, the CIRCLES framework was first introduced as a guide to help candidates nail Product Management interview questions, specifically questions on product sense. 

See, hiring managers want to see how you think about a problem and understand your process. Following the CIRCLES method allows you to answer design questions without missing a crucial beat. 

From here, this framework has been broadened out as an essential problem-solving framework in Product Management in general and is a versatile tool to help PMs get to the root of pretty much any problem. Beyond interviews, the CIRCLES Method offers a repeatable framework for addressing complex product-related challenges, such as designing new features, resolving user pain points, or improving workflows.

Its widespread adoption highlights its practicality. Product Managers now use it to systematically break down questions, generate well-informed solutions, and align outcomes with organizational goals. Whether you’re an aspiring PM preparing for interviews or a seasoned professional solving real-world problems, the CIRCLES method remains an indispensable tool.

How to follow each step of the CIRCLES Method? 

Don’t be a square! Embrace CIRCLES. Let’s take a closer look at each core stage of the CIRCLES method, and what you should be doing to follow this framework properly. Be it when answering interview questions or when tackling real-life problems in your role as a PM, here’s how to implement CIRCLES.

Step 1: Comprehend the situation 

To solve any problem correctly, you first need to know the facts and understand what’s being asked of you. Say you find yourself in a math class and confront this hellish-looking equation:

3a+2b=5c−4

Now before you bust the calculators out, you can’t begin to find the right answer without knowing what a, b, or c is. It’s impossible. Sure, if you’re a mathematician you can tinker around to express this equation differently, but with a PM brain switched on, you don’t even want to begin to look for answers. 

Instead, as a Product Manager, you’re afforded the ability to ask questions to make sure you understand the situation and the problem. You can and SHOULD ask what a, b, or c is. 

Then, you can start to work things out. 

Let’s put this differently. Say a stakeholder appears from the shadows, demands that they want the product to ‘perform’ better, and then disappears like a specter in the night. What the hell does that even mean?

You can’t just take that, guess what they mean, start working, and expect to nail it. You need to understand what’s been asked and clap back with qualifying questions like what metrics are important to them, what areas of the product are important to them, and what your customers like. 

You can find out the core information about your product by making use of the 5 W’s and H – No one’s seriously got a better name for this yet? This is a list of basic questions to help you get the context you need: 

• What is it?
• Who is it for?
• Why do they need it?
• When is it available?
• Where is it available?
• How does it work?

Once you know what the goal is, and what’s being asked of you, you need to think about the constraints. Every product has limitations that are holding it back. Know what yours are. Be aware of resources, budget, or timescale limitations. Failing to consider these things can lead to you making a solution that isn’t grounded in reality.

Step 2: Identify the customer

When you’re faced with a Product Management problem, you need to remember who you’re solving the problem for. Every change you make to your product needs to carefully consider your users and customers. This is where step two comes in. 

Building a product or updating a feature without knowing your audience is kind of like hosting a dinner party without knowing your guests’ dietary requirements. Spent 6 hours cooking the perfect beef Wellington? Be a bummer when you find out half your guests are vegan. Be even worse when a guest needs to bust out the EpiPen because your pesto pasta stater flared up their nut allergy. 

Taking the time to get to know your customers and users helps ensure that you’re making improvements and changes that they actually like and that they can actually stomach. This is something you do throughout the product lifecycle, not just at the beginning. 

Sure, if you haven’t a clue about your customers, take the time to build frameworks and product documentation like user personas and user profiling to confirm your assumptions and known facts about your users. 

Then, take advantage of usage data and other quantitative and qualitative data to understand their habits, needs, and wants, and monitor how all this changes over time. 

There are a million and one methods to take advantage of to learn more about your customers and users, so take your pick. Finding out about your users is a key part of product research. 

Learn more about the different types of product research:

Step 3: Report customer needs 

At this stage, you’ll likely be flooded with user personas and data from all your juicy research. You now need to shape that information into something that’s easy to understand. You need to find the narrative in that information so that you can pinpoint the needs of your customers. 

Essentially at this stage, you’re taking all the qualitative data and research  – the messy raw material – and pressing it through a sausage maker to create an appealing and easy-to-digest sausage. 

The best way to do this is through creating user stories. We’ve got a metric tonne of information on User Stories in our glossary:

Long story short, user stories are simple, structured statements that help you capture the needs of your customers in an easy-to-understand statement. They typically follow the structure:

“As a [type of user], I want [an action] so that [benefit or value].”

• Type of user: Describes the persona or role of the user making the request.
• Action: Specifies what the user wants to accomplish.
• Benefit or value: Explains why the user wants this product feature and what value it adds.

User Stories force you to think in terms of goals and outcomes instead of just features. It helps you understand what users actually want, and then you can start to come up with some solutions to help users meet this need.

Step 4: Cut (prioritize needs) 

You’ve assessed the problem, you’ve worked out your users, and you’ve found their needs and wants. At this stage, you’re likely spewing up countless ideas and solutions to meet their needs. But you can’t throw them all onto your product backlog and roadmap. 

No, no, no, you first need to validate your potential solutions to make sure they’re viable, effective, and the best use of your team’s time. You need to prune your ideas and cut some of the ones that may not fit right now. 

As much as you want to, you can’t do everything. Instead, a good Product Manager will take the time to work out what is the best thing to do right now. If you could only action one of your potential solutions to customer needs, which one is the best? 

Prioritization helps you find that out. 

Much like how there are multiple frameworks for product and customer research, there is a boatload of prioritization frameworks you can use to help validate your ideas. We’ve actually got a huge list of them that you can download and keep forever:

Of the various Product Management frameworks you can choose, let us take a look at some big hitters – the headliners in this festival of frameworks:

• MoSCoW Prioritization Model: MoSCoW prioritization categorizes ideas as Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, or Won’t-Have.This framework ensures teams focus on key deliverables while managing expectations effectively.
• Weighted impact scoring: Weighted impact scoring prioritizes ideas by assigning varying importance to criteria like customer demand, cost, or technical feasibility. Scores are multiplied by their weights, producing a total that helps rank ideas by their overall value.
• RICE scoring: RICE scoring helps evaluate ideas using four factors: Reach (how many users are affected), Impact (the level of improvement), Confidence (certainty about estimates), and Effort (work required). A formula combines these scores to rank ideas, prioritizing high-impact, low-effort initiatives.

It can be upsetting to kill your darlings, but cutting bad ideas is just as important as finding good ones. A strong PM knows when to draw a line in the sand, and the CIRCLES method helps keep that at the front of your mind when tackling Product Management Problems. 

Step 5: List your solutions

You’ve validated your ideas, time to list out your best solutions. Many PMs can get a bit intimidated by this, especially in an interview setting. But this is a great time to get creative. Back yourself and the previous steps. If you’ve followed the CIRCLES method properly to this point, you should have some well-validated and measured solutions that can be a hit. 

Don’t be put off by the need for the solutions to be perfect here. Think of it as the first draft of your novel – there are plenty more steps where you’ll be refining and improving. 

A good rule of thumb is to try and have at least 3 ideas in this stage. This is purely because your first idea is rarely going to be your best. This is an iterative process, your next few suggestions should build on your first idea and be better as a result. 

This step doesn’t have to be a solo endeavor. Collaborate with the rest of your Product Team and get their insights and perspectives. As long as they have good visibility of the product roadmap, strategy, vision, and share the same North Star metric, they could come up with a few belters. 

Remember, it’s okay to start big. Big ideas often lead to small, perfectly executable ones, and the more ideas you have to filter through, the better your chances of finding the best one.

Step 6: Evaluate trade-offs

No solution is perfect. There’s always going to be a negative factor. It’s important to evaluate all this so that you land on a solution that has the fewest – or least impactful – drawbacks. Every option you have will have some kind of downside. The trick is figuring out which drawbacks you can live with and which are deal-breakers.

There are many ways to do this evaluation. One is to create a Trade-off Matrix. This is your tool for evaluating solutions side by side. Compare each solution against critical criteria like cost, complexity, time to implement, and potential user impact. This will help you visualize which solution checks the most boxes and identify any major weaknesses early on.

You can also try to weigh risks vs. rewards. Not every solution will deliver the same level of benefit, and some come with bigger risks than others. What’s the reward for choosing a solution that might be riskier or harder to implement? Will the payoff be worth it in the long run? 

For example, a solution with a long development time might have a significant user impact, but the delay could cost you market share if competitors move faster. It’s your job to figure out if the reward justifies the risk.

Heck, you can even use a simple pros vs cons exercise to evaluate the trade-offs. With all this done, you should be able to identify the next big initiative for you to work on. All you need to do now is sum it all up. 

Step 7: Summarize your recommendations

This step is all about synthesizing your findings and presenting a clear, actionable course of action. This is where you tie together everything you’ve learned into a neat bow and make your case to stakeholders. It’s your conclusion. 

Your recommendations should be confident, well-supported by data, and rooted in the insights you’ve gathered throughout the process.

Of course, the main aspect of a summary is to keep it short. This should essentially be the elevator pitch for your final solution, highlighting why it’s best, why it’s better than others, and how you came to that conclusion, in around 30 seconds. 

When following the CIRCLES method in an interview, include the following in your final response: 

• Share the product or feature you’d recommend to the interviewer.
• Summarize what it is and highlight its benefits for the user and/or the company.
• Justify why you chose this solution over the alternatives.

Now, don’t expect that you’re going to have the final say. Be ready for questions, be it in an interview setting or in your day-to-day. Stakeholders will likely have concerns, so anticipate potential objections and have evidence-based responses ready. Think through the implications of your recommendations and prepare to defend them with clear logic and data. This is where your deep understanding of the customer and the market will serve you well.

To conclude, make sure your recommendations are clear and actionable so that everyone knows what to do next.

Why should product managers use the CIRCLES method? 

The CIRCLES Method provides a structured approach to solving design and improvement challenges in Product Management, be it in a high-stakes interview or when tackling issues with your team.

When the pressure is on, it can be easy to lose your train of thought and step away from the methodical approach we all learn to follow as PMs. By having this framework in the back of your mind, you’re tethered to the main talking points when drafting your response. Each step helps you really think about the problem, your goals, the users, their needs, and a solution. When drawing on the CIRCLES method, nothing is missed. 

Other benefits of the CIRCLES method include: 

• User-centric focus: No one is as important as your users. This framework puts them at the center of your thought process, making sure that their needs are carefully considered when coming up with product design solutions. 
• Effective prioritization: The CIRCLES method helps you quickly prioritize your ideas and cut out solutions that don’t work or that may be a time sink. Plus, you can easily include fan-favorite prioritization frameworks into the model to make sure you’re working on the most impactful solutions.
• Holistic problem solving: Product Management would be incredibly easy if it wasn’t for various constraints. Although everyone wants to build the best product, reality gets in the way and limits what you can do. This method makes sure that you’re thinking about those constraints from the jump, preventing you from developing pie-in-the-sky ideas that aren’t feasible. 
• Articulate your thought process: if you’re going to get buy-in from stakeholders, they need evidence for your suggestions. They need to know why. As it was first designed to help you shine in Product interviews, CIRCLES is a great blueprint to help you communicate your thought process and show why you’ve reached a solution. 
• Boosts your confidence:  With its structured approach, PMs can tackle complex problems with greater confidence, knowing they’ve considered every critical factor and are less likely to fumble the process.

Going in CIRCLES

Usually, going around in circles can be a bad thing, but not when you’re following the CIRCLES method. If you’re looking to develop your product sense, or prepare for a product sense interview, this framework can be used to keep you on track and make sure that you’re hitting all the right beats when working out a solution for a problem. The CIRCLES method is just one of many frameworks every good PM should know, so make sure to keep it tucked away in the back of your mind. In short, it’s a way to make sure that you’re following best practices when facing design and other Product Management problems. As PMs, we can always use a little bit of help sticking to best practices.

With ProdPad, our tools and features have best practices built-in, helping you to create effective roadmaps and Product Management documentation that is a cut above. With in-built prompts, frameworks to follow, and AI support from CoPilot, it’s easy to follow core Product Management principles that elevate your process.

See how ProdPad can help you and your team work better by trying out our free-to-explore Sandbox environment. With pre-loaded data, you can get a feel of what it’s like to have ProdPad by your side. Try it today.