Overview
The CIRCLES method is a process to find a thorough, meaningful response to design questions, most often used during the planning phase to work out potential solutions.
Designed by Lewis C. Lin, it’s also commonly used in interviews to assess product management ability.
The CIRCLES acronym is as follows:
1. Comprehend the situation — Clarify the goal, Understand situational constraints (time, resources, etc.), Understand the context by consulting expert sources
2. Identify customer personas or JTBD’s — Be critical about your personas to select user personas that are most crucial to the product.
3. Report the customer’s needs — Develop the user story and verbalize what their pain points look like.
4. Cut anything unnecessary, prioritize, and estimate the ROI of each part — Construct a prioritization methodology, and evaluate which parts of the solution are most impactful to the user.
5. List the solutions — Ideate as many solutions as possible, not marrying yourself to any particular idea too early.
6. Evaluate the trade-offs — be thoughtful, objective, attack your own ideas, and identify the trade-offs associated with each idea.
7. Summarize the recommendation —what is it, recap of process, why this > others, then select the idea with the trade-offs that make the most sense, listing out the potential next-steps required to fortify that final idea.
