I first ran into CIRCLES the way most product managers do: prepping for interviews, memorizing an acronym so I wouldn't freeze when someone asked me to "design an alarm clock for blind people." For years I treated it exactly like that. Interview theatre, not a real tool. Then I started running feature kickoffs without it and kept hitting the same failure: a team that was fluent in solutions and fuzzy on the problem.
So I went back to CIRCLES, not as a script, but as a checklist for the one thing teams reliably skip: comprehending the situation before reaching for a fix.
What it actually is
Seven steps, and only the first two matter as much as people think they don't:
- Comprehend the situation (who, what constraints, what's already been tried).
- Identify the customer. Not "users," a specific segment with a specific job to be done.
- Report their needs (pains, not features).
- Cut through prioritization (pick the two or three needs worth solving now).
- List solutions (as many as you can, before judging any of them).
- Evaluate trade-offs (cost, risk, impact, reversibility).
- Summarize with a recommendation and why.
In an interview, you do this out loud in twenty minutes to show you can structure ambiguity. In a real kickoff, you do it over a single working session with the people who'll actually build the thing, and the value moves almost entirely into the first three letters.
Where I actually use it
When we were scoping Ovela's concierge matching (pairing an international patient with the right dental specialist and price tier), the instinct in the room was to jump straight to "List": build a filter UI, add a recommendation algorithm, ship a quiz. All solutions, zero comprehension.
Running it through Comprehend and Identify forced a different conversation. The customer wasn't "patients." It was someone who had already decided to travel for care and was now terrified of picking the wrong hospital from another country. Their need wasn't more options; it was fewer, better-vetted ones, explained by a human. That reframed "Cut" entirely: we dropped the filter UI and built a concierge intake form backed by a real person on the other end. One specialty first, dental, so we could prove the model before expanding it.
The acronym isn't the value. Forcing the room to sit in "we don't fully understand this yet" for twenty extra minutes is the value.
The concierge-first approach, not a smarter algorithm, is what let us compete on trust instead of price. It's the single biggest strategic call behind Ovela's first year.
Where it breaks
CIRCLES assumes you have a room willing to slow down. If your team has already shipped the fix in their heads before the meeting starts, running through the letters becomes exactly the theatre I dismissed it as years ago, a script read aloud instead of thought actually happening. The framework only earns its keep when someone in the room is willing to say "hang on, go back to Identify" and mean it.
The one-sentence version
Use CIRCLES not because the order is magic, but because it makes skipping straight to solutions feel like what it is: skipping a step.