Community products are rising again.
Search is being rewritten by AI.
And senior product roles are increasingly a blend of product, platform, and business.
Reddit hiring Maria Angelidou-Smith as Chief Product Officer is one of the cleanest signals of that shift. She has led major products at Meta and helped scale Personio. Now Reddit wants faster product execution across discovery, community tools, and the end-to-end app experience. (Source: Reddit blog)
If you are a product manager, the headline itself is not the point.
The point is what it reveals about what companies will reward next.
Even if you do not work on a “community product,” you still deal with community dynamics every week: trust, quality, misuse, group behavior, incentives, and reputation.
Most PMs read executive hires like trivia.
A smaller group uses them like a training tool.
This post is a simple version of that training tool.
You will get one practical move you can run today, then the premium section expands it into a full month of repeatable career practice.
If you also feel like your work is strong but your impact is not landing, you will probably recognize the pattern from Invisible Product Management Work.
The Signal Behind Reddit’s Hire
Here is what this hire implies:
Community skill is no longer “nice to have.” It is a core product competency.
AI-shaped discovery is becoming table stakes, not a specialty track.
“Leadership” is increasingly defined by how well you connect product choices to platform health and business outcomes.
If you want the bigger career context behind this trend, the reset lens in Product Manager Meaning: Career Reset explains why so many PMs feel stuck even when they are performing.
Now let’s turn the signal into action.
Free Win: Build A Community Loop Story In 30 Minutes
Companies want PMs who understand how people behave in groups, not only as single users.
You can show this without working at a pure community company.
Run this once in the next week:
Pick one feature where users react to each other, not only to content
Examples: comments, replies, sharing, reviews, approvals, mentions, escalations, collaboration, even internal workflows.Sketch the loop on one page
What brings them in
What they do first
What reward they feel
Why they return
Find two breakpoints that damage the loop
Common ones: confusion, low trust, spam or abuse, unclear norms, low quality, slow feedback.Design one small change that improves safety, clarity, or value
Keep it small enough to ship without a six-week debate.Pick one primary metric you can defend
Use one that signals health, not vanity. For example:Reply rate (replies per post or per thread)
7-day return rate
Reports per 1,000 actions (quality and safety)
“Helpful” votes or accepted answers (quality)
Now you have a clean story:
“I improved group behavior by fixing the loop, not by shipping a random feature.”
That kind of proof travels well in performance reviews and interviews, especially when paired with a strong operating cadence like the one in PM Visibility Playbook.
If you are early in your product career and building credibility from scratch, you can also borrow the culture-building angle from How to Succeed as Your Company’s First Product Manager.
What To Do Next
If you only do one thing from this post, do the loop exercise above.
If you want the full playbook, the next section turns the same signal into a repeatable monthly system: AI discovery practice, promotion stories, and a weekly executive-news drill you can run in under 20 minutes.