Metrics question
You are part of Reddit Product Management team. How would you measure the success of Reddit?
- Metrics
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests defining success metrics for a community platform where content quality and community health matter as much as raw activity.
How to approach it
- Clarify what 'success' means here: platform growth, content quality, or advertiser value, since Reddit balances all three uniquely.
- Propose a core engagement metric: weekly active unique commenters, not just viewers, since Reddit's value comes from participation, not passive scrolling.
- Add a community health metric: subreddit moderator retention and active-subreddit count, since Reddit's product is really thousands of self-governed communities.
- Add a content quality guardrail: upvote-to-report ratio or removed-content rate, since toxic content is a specific, known Reddit risk.
- Add a monetization metric separately: ad revenue per DAU, since Reddit needs to prove engagement translates to a sustainable business.
What a strong answer includes
- Recognizes Reddit's product is really its communities, so picks metrics around moderator health and active subreddits, not just app-wide DAU.
- Separates participation (comments, posts) from passive consumption (scrolling), since Reddit's differentiator is active discussion.
- Uses an illustrative number, e.g. assume 10% of MAU post or comment weekly, and targets moving that participation rate up.
- Adds a content-integrity guardrail specific to Reddit's known challenges with toxic or low-quality communities.
Common mistakes
- Treating Reddit like a generic social app and picking only DAU/MAU without addressing community and moderation health.
- Ignoring monetization entirely, since the question is about success of the company, not just the product.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you measure the health of individual subreddits differently from platform-wide health?
- How would you balance free speech concerns against the content-quality guardrail you proposed?
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More questions from Reddit
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop