Reddit Product Manager Interview Questions

1.Describe a product feature you shipped that wasn't the most elegant solution but solved the user problem effectively. What were the tradeoffs and how did you defend the approach?

2.Describe a time when you had to completely change your product approach based on new information or feedback. What was the original plan and why did you pivot?

3.Tell me about a time you had to make a product decision when your user research showed conflicting feedback from different communities. How did you decide which direction to go?

4.Tell me about a time you had to make a product decision that would impact system performance at scale. What was the situation, what tradeoffs did you evaluate, and how did the system handle the load after launch?

5.Tell me about a product decision you made autonomously that had significant impact. How did you approach making that call without extensive approval processes?

6.Tell me about a time you had to design a product feature knowing it would be targeted by bad actors or abused at scale. How did you approach the trust and safety considerations?

7.Walk me through a time you advocated for a feature that empowered users to express themselves more authentically, even when there were concerns about complexity or risk.

8.Reddit's search traffic is growing 50% year-over-year but our current search infrastructure is hitting performance limits. As PM, how would you approach scaling this system?

9.A major subreddit moderator reports that your new content moderation tool is causing false positives and removing legitimate posts. How would you investigate and resolve this issue?

10.Our ML recommendation feed is showing a 5% drop in user engagement across all communities. As the PM, how would you investigate and what hypotheses would you test first?

11.You're launching a feature that requires changes to both our GraphQL API and mobile apps. How would you coordinate the rollout across web, iOS, and Android teams?

12.You need to add a new feature to Reddit's mobile app that requires real-time data from our backend services. How would you work with engineering to ensure this doesn't impact our current 99.9% uptime?

13.Reddit's Trust and Safety team flags that a new feature you're building could be exploited for harassment. Walk me through how you'd redesign the feature to minimize abuse while preserving the core user value.

14.Design a real-time voting system for Reddit that can handle when a popular post gets millions of votes in an hour. How would you ensure vote counts stay accurate without bringing down the site?

15.Design a content recommendation API that serves personalized feeds to Reddit's mobile apps. The API needs to handle 50 million requests per minute while incorporating real-time user behavior and community trends.

16.Design the moderation queue system for Reddit that needs to handle millions of reported posts and comments daily across 100,000+ active communities. How do you ensure moderators get the right content to review without being overwhelmed?

17.Design Reddit's ad targeting and delivery system that needs to serve relevant ads across thousands of different communities while respecting each community's culture and content policies. How do you balance advertiser goals with community trust?

18.Design a real-time chat system for Reddit that can handle live discussion threads during major events like sports games or breaking news. The system needs to serve millions of concurrent users while maintaining Reddit's community moderation model.

19.Design Reddit's search infrastructure that needs to index billions of posts and comments in real-time while providing relevant results across 100,000+ communities. How do you handle the fact that search relevance varies dramatically between different types of communities?

20.Tell me about a time you had to influence an engineering team to prioritize differently when they disagreed with your product roadmap. What was your approach?

21.Describe a time when you chose to ship something that wasn't the perfect solution but solved an urgent user problem. How did you communicate this decision to stakeholders?

22.Reddit's communities have vastly different content standards and moderation philosophies. Walk me through a time you had to design a feature knowing it would be received completely differently across various user groups.

23.Tell me about a time you had to coordinate a complex product launch across multiple Reddit teams - web, mobile, backend, and data science. What was your approach to keeping everyone aligned?

24.Reddit's platform has been used for both incredible community building and serious harm. Walk me through how you'd approach launching a new communication feature knowing it could be exploited by bad actors.

25.You need to sunset a beloved feature that a vocal minority of Reddit users depend on, but data shows it's causing performance issues for the majority. How would you lead this decision and rollout?

26.Reddit's daily active users increased 25% after we launched a new discovery feature, but our average session time dropped 8%. How would you investigate what's happening and decide if this is a problem?

27.Estimate how much server cost Reddit would save annually if we reduced the frequency of our home feed refreshes from every 30 seconds to every 60 seconds. Walk through your assumptions.

28.A popular gaming subreddit is threatening to go private because they think Reddit's new live chat feature will hurt their community culture. How would you approach this situation and what data would you want to see?

29.You're seeing a 15% increase in reported harassment across all communities after launching a new direct messaging feature. The Trust and Safety team wants to disable it immediately, but usage is growing 40% week-over-week. How do you make this decision?

30.Reddit's video hosting costs are growing 300% year-over-year while video ad revenue is only growing 150%. The CFO wants a plan to make video profitable. How would you approach this problem?

31.Estimate how many additional moderators Reddit would need to hire if we removed all automated content moderation and relied entirely on human review. Include your assumptions about content volume and review times.