Reddit Global taps ex-Google exec in first CPO role

Reddit today welcomes Pali Bhat to the Reddit team as its chief product officer.

The announcement:

Bhat brings more than 15 years of expertise in leading teams and products across consumer services, developer platforms, fintech, and cloud, including a number of Google’s flagship services.

Bhat will report directly to Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, and oversee Reddit’s product organisation where he will lead and facilitate the creation of tools and features that bring community and belonging to Reddit.

The news comes as the global tech company recently opened its Australian office in July 2021, its first in the Southern Hemisphere.

Before joining Reddit, Bhat held senior leadership roles for more than 10 years at Google, Inc. He was most recently the vice president of product and design at Google Cloud, leading a nearly-thousand person team of engineers, product managers, user experience designers, and researchers across a multi-billion dollar high-growth product suite.

Previously at Google, Bhat was vice president of product management leading Google’s payment products globally, across both consumer experiences such as Google Pay and a large-scale payments platform that powered monetisation across Google’s services. Bhat’s passion for developer solutions also resulted in his leading product for actions on Google, which enabled the developer community to extend the functionality of Google’s consumer services including Google Assistant.

Prior to Google, Bhat held leadership positions at SAP Labs and McKinsey & Co. He holds an MS in CS from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and an MBA from Duke University. Bhat is based in San Francisco, California, and some of his favorite Reddit communities include r/askreddit, r/astrophotography and r/cricket.

Source: Reddit media release