Product Sense: Improve Reddit Onboarding

Open-ended product round: pick a part of Reddit's onboarding flow and propose improvements. The interviewer cares about the framework — user segmentation, goal definition, hypothesis generation, measurement — more than the specific ideas. Requirements A conversational round on Reddit's onboarding experience. The interviewer expects the candidate to: Define which onboarding flow is in scope (new-user-first-session, signed-out-to-signed-in conversion, mobile-vs-web, default-feed personalization, etc.). Pick one user segment and articulate that segment's goal in the first session. Identify 2–3 friction points in the current flow against that goal. Propose 2–3 improvements, each tied to a hypothesis about why it would move the metric. Define how each improvement would be measured (success metric, guardrail metric, decision criterion). Notes The interviewer treats this as a thinking-out-loud exercise. Silent thinking time over 30 seconds is a red flag; narrate the segmentation and prioritization decisions as they happen. For a Reddit ML Platform / ML Infra candidate, the strongest framing tilts toward a personalization / recommendation lens: "the onboarding flow's job is to bootstrap the cold-start recommender as quickly as possible — what signals can we capture in the first session to make the second session's home feed not feel generic?" This anchors the discussion in the candidate's home turf. Avoid feature-list answers ("add a tutorial, add gamification, add a tour"). The grading is on the framework: segmentation → goal → hypothesis → metric. A small number of well-justified ideas beats a long list of unmotivated ones. Preparation Use Reddit's actual signed-out and signed-up onboarding before the round. Note where the flow asks for input, what it personalizes on, and what the friction points are. First-hand product use is the cheapest preparation. Rehearse the framework out loud on 2–3 different products (not just Reddit). The segmentation → goal → hypothesis → metric loop is portable across product-sense prompts. Pre-decide a strong default segmentation cut for Reddit (e.g. mobile signup → first-session retention → 7-day return). Having a default keeps the conversation moving when the interviewer asks for a specific scope.