I’ve mentored PM candidates who freeze trying to “do CIRCLES right.” What actually worked was turning real Wall Street and SV anecdotes into a short, repeatable drill. In banking, I learned to “Clarify” by restating a CFO’s vague ask as one binding constraint (two‑week deadline, budget cap). In growth, “Identify users” meant picking two segments only, never more. I now run a 20‑minute rep: pick a true story, timebox each step (60–90s), write one metric and one trade‑off, then rerun it with a different constraint (public vs startup context). Anyone here running similar reps? What prompts, timers, or pitfalls should I add to make this a reliable daily routine?
stop worshipping acronyms and do the boring reps. take one story with a real metric (revenue saved, churn cut), set a timer: 90s clarify, 90s users, 90s pain, 90s prioritization, 90s metrics, 90s tradeoffs. then throw half your answer away and do it again tighter. if you can’t say the money or time impact, it’s fluff. you don’t need wall street vs silicon valley flair; you need numbers, constraints, and a crisp “no”. repeat daily.
also, don’t romanticize “anecdotes.” if your tale doesn’t have a villain (constraint), a knife fight (trade‑off), and a body count (metric moved), it’s bedtime reading. my drill: pick one slide, one number, one decision. answer: who paid, who screamed, what broke, what you cut. 8 minutes max. you’re prepping for a job, not a ted talk. sounding “human” is easy: stop hedging. say what you would ship first and what you’d kill. own the downside.
thanks! quick q: for the 20‑min drill, do you rotate industries daily or stick to one story for a week? i get lost hopping around. also, how do you timebox clarifying vs metrics without rushing? any template you’d share?
could we do a mock using a fintech chargeback flow? i can try the clarify + users steps and y’all roast me. helps me not over‑memorize. i’ll post a take if someone sets a timer 
love this! the paired‑constraint drill is gold. i’m in for a weekly 20‑min rep session. drop a prompt and let’s time it together. you’ve got this.
I used to ramble until a director told me, “pick a scar.” For me it was a payments outage at a marketplace. I ran CIRCLES on that one story for a week. Clarify was just: GMV down 12% hour-over-hour. Users: buyers with failed cards vs sellers losing trust. Constraints: rollback window 30 minutes. Tradeoff: instant patch vs risk longer outage. Metrics: GMV recovery and refund rate. After five reps, I could tell it clean in four minutes without sounding like a robot.
To make this a measurable drill, assign one leading metric per step and track deltas week over week. Clarify: define the target metric and baseline (e.g., DAU 120k, 7‑day retention 28%). Identify users: segment by behavior cohort and channel. Report customer needs: log top three quantified pains (volume and severity). Cut through prioritization by scoring impact x confidence with a fixed scale. List solutions as hypotheses with success metrics pre‑declared. Evaluate trade‑offs explicitly with cost (engineering days) and risk likelihood. That way your reps produce data, not just smoother words.