Reddit · Strategy · Mid · 45 to 60 minutes

Should Reddit make search a core action?

Reddit is a network of user run topic communities where people post, vote, and discuss questions, links, and advice. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

product strategy
systems thinking
prioritization
metrics
stakeholder judgment

The situation

It is late 2023. You are a PM responsible for discovery and information seeking at Reddit. Leadership has noticed a clear pattern: many people start on Google, add "reddit" to their query, read a thread, and leave. At the same time, internal data shows that new users who use Reddit search in their first week are more likely to come back than users who only browse the home feed. The CEO and head of product want a recommendation for next year planning. The question is whether Reddit should keep search as a supporting feature for people who already know what subreddit or thread they want, or shift more of the product toward helping users ask a question and find a trustworthy answer directly on Reddit. This could improve retention, reduce reliance on outside platforms, and build on Reddit's strength in honest, community generated answers. But it could also create tension with Reddit's culture, put more pressure on moderators, favor readers over contributors, and make the product feel less like a set of communities and more like a utility layer on top of them. You need to recommend a direction and explain the trade offs.

What to produce

A 1 to 2 page strategy memo.

Your answer must

State the core user problem Reddit should solve, and explain why people currently use Google plus Reddit for that job.
Recommend a clear strategic direction for the next 12 to 18 months, including 2 to 3 priority product bets in order.
Explain the main trade offs for searchers, contributors, moderators, and Reddit's monetization model.
Define success metrics and leading indicators, including how you would measure answer quality, retention, and community health.
Identify the biggest risks to Reddit's culture and product defensibility, and give practical mitigations.

Constraints

Your strategy must preserve subreddit level moderation and community rules as a core part of the product.
Do not assume Reddit can replace Google as a traffic source in the near term.
Do not rely on Reddit creating its own expert content library, the strategy should build on user generated discussions.
Any recommendation must work for both people seeking answers and the communities that create those answers.

Format

Use short headings and bullet points. A simple structure is: diagnosis, recommendation, priority bets, metrics, risks.

How Reddit actually played it

Breaks Reddit down into layers of product decisions: interest rooms, community moderation, voting and threading, and search as a main action. It also covers why Google traffic and data licensing became the revenue unlock.

Community structure is a product decision that compounds over years
Being the place people search for honest answers creates a distribution engine
Look at which layers of a product are hard to copy

Built from Reddit at 20: Why The Platform Still Dominates Communities by Sid Arora (JAPM).