Meet the PM Behind Reddit Search: Rachel Caisi Miller

Community platform Reddit has undergone significant transformation recently. The content community platform has grown 21% year over year, driven largely by users discovering a new way to find answers. This year, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman expressed the organisation's intentions to become a fully-fledged search engine, combining its thriving community and its search capabilities.

At the heart of this product transformation is Rachel Caisi Miller, Product Manager at Reddit. We discussed what makes Reddit Search such a fascinating challenge. From the shift in user behaviour, where Reddit is becoming a go-to destination for "social search", to the evolution of the product team itself, we explore how the platform is being redefined.

Caption: Rachel speaking on a panel at Ladies Who Tech.

The complexities of building a search platform

Rachel explains how building Reddit Search is challenging and far more complex than people imagine. "Reddit has over 20 years of content, so there are big infrastructure challenges to make all that data accessible quickly," she says. "Then there's relevance: not just keyword matches, but also semantic meaning, timeliness, freshness, and many other factors."

In addition, Rachel explains that she and her team have to decide how to present results, creating the order, size and style of different units, depending on user intent.

This complexity is amplified by the scale Reddit now operates at. Announcing its financial results, Reddit shared that its platform has over 110 million daily active users in Q2 2025 and weekly active users totalling 416 million. With so many users accessing the platform every day, ensuring search feels fast and relevant is a priority for the Search team.

Balancing user feedback

As with many product roles, Rachel explains that one of the most challenging aspects is balancing user feedback with existing priorities. It takes good decision-making to prioritise what's best for the product and users. "Reddit has a very passionate set of users who are very vocal about what they want and their feedback on products," Rachel explains.

"However, it can be easy to forget that usually, the most passionate users are the ones who will speak up, and they don't necessarily represent all users," she notes. When developing products, Rachel explains how important it is to keep in mind all of the different sources of data you have about what is best for the product. "This includes user feedback, formalised user research, data insights, and your existing knowledge of the product and how people use it."

The importance of looking at all sources of data is backed up by the fact that its AI-powered Reddit Answers tool, launched in 2024, already has 6 million weekly users. With this level of usage, a vocal minority can shape the future of the product, but product decisions must be guided by structured data alongside community feedback.

Industry Search shifts

There's been a big shift towards how users interact with the platform, Rachel highlights. The rise of LLMs and social platforms has altered the traditional user journey of Google Search. It forms a bigger question of how users will access information in the future. "We're seeing more people perform 'social search' in which people go directly to social platforms like Reddit, TikTok, or Instagram for recommendations," Rachel explains, commenting on how users have evolved over time. "People want authentic human conversations, and that's where Reddit has always been strong."

This mirrors Reddit's broader organisational growth. Since joining in 2021, Reddit has more than tripled in size. That expansion was vital to building teams to reach the company's ambition of becoming the "go-to search engine," as CEO Steve Huffman has emphasised.

"At Reddit, we have grown our teams of engineers, designers, and data scientists. That growth has been essential to helping us build the product we want. " Rachel says. "Within the team, I engage often with our engineering managers and other product managers. I also work very closely with our designers since I'm on a front-end focused team, as well as with data science and user research," she adds.

The investment in ML and AI talent has come to fruition. AI is now front and centre, and it's paying off. In Q2 2025, Reddit posted its most profitable quarter ever, $500 million in revenue and $89 million net income, up 78% year-on-year, driven partly by investment in AI search features like Reddit Answers. Investors rewarded this pivot, with stock prices rising more than 45% after Q2 earnings.

Product best practices to manage your workload

As we mentioned above, balancing user needs and all of the data points in a fast-changing industry can be challenging. We asked Rachel if there are any best practices she follows to manage her workload. "Every quarter, we will make progress towards some user problems, which means that the relative priority between the major areas can change. Revisiting these problems before making decisions about what product changes need to be prioritised can really help guide thinking and make it clearer what needs to be worked on," she says.

Many product professionals have also expressed how they interact with AI internally. For Rachel, she often finds that to use it to its full potential, she would have to add so much context to a model that it would end up taking up too much of her time.

"I think we need to be cautious about what information is input into LLMs for data privacy reasons, so it's a good idea to check your company policy on that," she adds. However, she does say that she uses it semi-frequently to brainstorm ideas and sanity check any edge cases she may have missed for different products.

Reflecting on personal growth as a junior product person

Reflecting on how she grows as a Product Manager, Rachel explains how her progress has been self-directed. "I’m the longest-tenured PM on search, so there have been a lot of changes around me where I've had to figure things out as I go," she notes.

The biggest skills that she tends to hone in on are note-taking and overcommunication. "Every day, I prep notes before meetings, which is easier for me since I'm in London and have quiet time before the US team wakes up. During meetings, I bold action items directly in my notes so I can easily skim my notes and find past AI’s" she says. This helps her to ensure that things don't fall through the cracks, especially in distributed teams.

While search has sometimes worked in isolation, we're increasingly working cross-functionally with other teams. That brings both benefits (better alignment) and challenges (constant coordination).

In addition to her normal work, Rachel also encourages junior or prospective product managers to lead projects outside of a typical PM’s responsibilities to build skills and connections. She manages product and engineers at Taimaka, a nonprofit revolutionising malnutrition treatment with tech and has founded several initiatives. “I founded a mentorship program for 50+ students from underrepresented groups and a completely new employee resource group dedicated to increasing the visibility of disabilities.” Rachel also praises Reddit's strong Women in Product community. "This community was invaluable when I was more junior.”

Closing out our conversation, Rachel encourages junior product people to influence without fear “You have more power than you think, and product managers are uniquely equipped with the skillset to drive change across the company and beyond."