Reddit · Strategy · Mid · 45 to 60 minutes

How should Reddit break out of its niche?

Reddit is a website and app where people join topic-based communities called subreddits to post, vote, and discuss. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Strategic thinking
Segmentation
Community design
Prioritization
Metrics

The situation

It is late 2017. The VP of Consumer Product at Reddit asks you for a strategy recommendation. Reddit has a strong identity among internet natives and topic obsessed users, but many first-time visitors find the product confusing, visually dated, and hard to navigate. Leadership believes there is room to serve a much broader audience without losing what makes Reddit distinct, yet the company cannot simply become another generic social feed. Its value comes from user-run communities, volunteer moderators, and high signal discussions in some subreddits, all of which could be damaged if growth brings too much low quality participation. At the same time, peer social platforms have trained mainstream users to expect easier onboarding, clearer discovery, and more polished mobile and web experiences. Your job is to propose how Reddit should grow from a niche, tech-forward destination into a more mainstream product over the next 12 to 18 months. You need to recommend where to focus, which tradeoffs to accept, and how to measure whether the strategy is working.

What to produce

A 1 to 2 page product strategy memo.

Your answer must

Define the core growth problem and identify up to two target user segments Reddit should prioritize next.
Recommend a product strategy with two or three major bets, explain why each matters, and state what you would not prioritize.
Explain how your plan preserves community quality and autonomy as new users arrive, including the role of moderators.
Propose success metrics and guardrails across acquisition, activation, retention, and discussion quality.
Call out the biggest risks, tradeoffs, and dependencies, and explain how you would test or phase the strategy.

Constraints

Keep the core subreddit and voting model intact.
Do not rely on a future search algorithm change, celebrity event, or pandemic driven demand to make the plan work.
Assume moderation continues to depend mainly on volunteer moderators, not a large full time review workforce.
Stay within a 12 to 18 month horizon for changes Reddit can reasonably ship.

Format

Use headings for diagnosis, target segments, strategic bets, moderation plan, metrics, and risks.

How Reddit actually played it

Covers how Reddit shed its customer segment problem, benefited from Covid, empowered communities versus Quora, got Google traffic and planned revenue diversification.

Community moderation scales a product
Search partnerships can drive growth
Reduce dependence on a single revenue source

Built from Reddit's growth to 1 billion monthly users, explained by Bandan Singh (Productify).