Product design question
How will you improve Reddit's home page?
- Product design
- Easy
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Product improvement instinct on a content aggregation platform, checking whether you can name a specific discovery or trust problem rather than generic homepage tweaks.
How to approach it
- Define the user: a logged-in Reddit user browsing their front page, distinguishing casual browsers from highly engaged subreddit members.
- Identify the core pain point: the home feed mixes high-quality niche subreddit content with low-effort viral posts, making genuinely good content hard to find.
- Prioritize content quality signal over layout changes, since ranking, not visual design, drives most complaints about Reddit's home page.
- Propose a feature: a 'best of your communities' section that surfaces top posts from subreddits a user engages with most, weighted by comment quality, not just upvotes.
- Address discovery separately: a lightweight 'communities you might like' module based on cross-posting patterns among subreddits the user already follows.
- Define success as increased time spent in comments, a proxy for quality engagement, and growth in subreddit subscriptions from the discovery module.
What a strong answer includes
- Distinguishes comment-quality signal from raw upvotes, a specific and Reddit-appropriate insight most candidates would miss.
- Separates the ranking fix from the discovery fix, proposing two distinct, testable features rather than one vague redesign.
- Uses time in comments as a quality proxy, appropriate for Reddit's discussion-driven culture, rather than a generic engagement metric.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a purely visual redesign without addressing the underlying content ranking problem.
- Using upvote count alone as a quality signal, ignoring that upvotes can favor low-effort viral content over substantive discussion.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prevent the 'best of your communities' section from just reshowing what a user already saw?
- How would you measure content quality beyond upvotes and comment count?
More product design questions
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop