Sonos CEO: ‘We All Feel Really Terrible' About the Bungled App Update

WIRED

09-05-2025

May 9, 2025 4:55 PM We sat down with Tom Conrad, the interim CEO of Sonos, to talk about the app, the company's relationship with its loyal users, and what other changes are ahead.
Sonos is very, very sorry for ruining your speaker system.
In fact, Sonos' interim CEO Tom Conrad says he feels personally responsible for that. He told me so in an interview on his media tour to recap his first 100 days leading the company.
On May 7, 2024, Sonos launched an update to its app that quickly became almost universally hated by its users. The update disabled features and disrupted key capabilities like sleep timers and volume controls. Longtime Sonos customers, many of whom have sunk hundreds of dollars into multiroom systems that suddenly felt broken, were furious.
Since then, Sonos has admitted it messed up, redesigned its app yet again, and put out some iterative updates. Still, the company struggled to regain its footing and justify new products like a pair of over-the-ear headphones that, while excellent quality, did not fully integrate into Sonos' home audio speakers.
In January 2025, Sonos leader Patrick Spence stepped down from his role as CEO and from the Sonos board. Conrad, a Sonos board member since 2017, took Spence's place, pledging to restore the company's good name.
Conrad has a long history in the tech industry, most prominently as the cocreator of the music streaming app Pandora. He's also no stranger to brands in turmoil: He was the chief product officer of the failed media app Quibi, and served a brief stint as director engineering at Pets.com, one of the most prominent flameouts of the 2000 dot-com crash.
His time at Sonos didn't start out all that smoothly either. A week before he was slated to take over as interim CEO, Conrad evacuated with his wife and 1-year-old daughter from wildfires in southern California. A few days later, his house was burglarized. After that start, Sonos has floundered with some hardware misfires as well. The company announced a streaming box in February 2025, then quickly canceled it. Just this month, The Verge reported that Sonos is ending its partnership with Ikea. Despite all that, Conrad says he feels hopeful for the future of the company.
We spoke one day after Sonos' Q2 earnings call, which showed that despite a chaotic year, the company exceeded its profit expectations. Almost exactly one year after the disastrous app redesign, Conrad has come to atone for some sins.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: So we should just get right out with it. The app that launched a year ago was very controversial. It was kind of a mess, people did not like it. How do you actively move beyond that? What was your first order of business?
Tom Conrad: A year ago, I think the company struggled with four things. Two of them, I call 'em sort of a mistake. We knew we were making a set of lesser used features that weren't implemented on the new software platform. The company made a decision to launch with the intention of doing fast-follow releases that would bring that functionality under the fold.
Second thing was we were radically changing the user experience. We had spent a lot of time in the usability lab setting coming to the belief that it was an improvement on the old experience. Anytime you make those kinds of changes, there's going to be a fraction of your audience who is uncomfortable with the change.
The company decided to move forward understanding that they were stepping into both of those arenas. The third category though is the one that the company just didn't understand. And that's the real world—the heterogeneous environment of our customer's homes that we just didn't have the performance and reliability that we believed we had.
And to be clear, if we'd known, we never would've shipped the software. No reasonable person would've shipped the software if we had understood the reliability and performance characteristics of the product in our customer's home. So we all feel really terrible about that and have made a lot of changes to the way that we work and collaborate and prioritize to make sure that never happens again.
What changes needed to be made? What was missing from understanding that user experience?
We just have a much more profound understanding of the complex networking environments of our customers' homes. They live in apartments with literally a hundred access points competing for Wi-Fi signal strength on the same channel. They have surprising and esoteric network configurations that you wouldn't imagine. We are a platform that runs software from other people, from Spotify, from Apple, and so forth. And there's an incredible matrix there. Our customers love their hardware players and keep them for an extremely long period of time.
Part of the work is making sure that when we test our software it reflects these real world environments. And we've made tremendous progress on that. We've also dramatically expanded our beta program, and then we've also reorganized the way the company works in my tenure.
When I came in the door, we did an inventory of the programs that were in progress, and there were dozens. Too many of them were not staffed for success, I would say, and the relative priority was not well understood by the company or the people on those teams. And so we did a lot of work quickly in my first four weeks to rationalize all of that and reprioritize it and to get us focused not on dozens of things, but maybe 10 things.
So when you say rationalizing and reprioritizing, does that mean moving people around? Replacing people?
Yeah, so at the first earnings call, we pared the size of the company back by 12 percent or something, and we dramatically reorganized the product organization.
[Sonos laid off roughly 100 people in August 2024. Under Conrad's tenure, the company laid off 200 more employees on February 5, 2025.]
Notably, for the first time, we have some scaled staffed initiatives that are just about software, which is a really powerful unlock for the company. And so for all of the progress that we have made with performance and reliability of the platform for our customers, we've made a similar amount of progress internally around how people here are feeling about their work at Sonos.
It is really tough, I think, to be in any environment where you've let your customers down when you're customer-centric. And if anything, Sonos is customer-centric. It's doubly hard when you work and you don't understand the relative priority of your contribution. And we've really reset that ladder thing as much as the former thing, and people understand how their work fits into the success of Sonos today, and it's really reset the cultural tone.
In the year since this app has rolled out, there's been all these updates and changes. In the time that you've been there, has this whole experience taught you anything else about your users?
I think part of what gets me out of bed every morning to do this reasonably hard job is that Sonos has a really special place in our customer's lives. I mean, sure we're the soundtrack for barbecues and dinner parties. But it's not an exaggeration to say that we're literally there for birth, for death. I mean, let's be honest, for conception.
Ha!
I mean, you can't say that about Microsoft Excel.
Well, it depends on how freaky you are, I guess.
Yeah, I suppose so. It is really an honor to get to work on something that is so webbed into the emotional fabric of people's lives, but the consequence of that is when we fail, it has an emotional impact.
I was talking to a customer on social media a few weeks ago. He was having problems with his system and it was the day of his parents' 50th wedding anniversary celebration. All he wanted was music for the party. Where you might be tolerant of a hiccup in your experience scrolling Instagram one day, it has a different emotional wall up when you can't have music for a once-in-a-lifetime kind of celebration.
If anything, the experience of interacting with our customers over the course of the last 100 days is just this reminder of what we do goes beyond just software. It's an emotional soundtrack for people's lives. It just needs to work every time.
I'm curious about the software-hardware divide. Sonos is a fundamentally hardware product. How does your software mojo help a company that lives or dies on the hardware?
I mean, it's such a delight to get to work with our acoustic team and the industrial design team and the hardware teams broadly. They're just the best in the world at this stuff, and it is such a central part of the obvious identity of Sonos. But Sonos is also a platform there's critical table-stake software dimensions to each of our products—power management for portables, noise cancellation for headphones, 3D positioning for immersive audio.
If I were to critique those years, I think perhaps we didn't make the right level of investment in the platform software of Sonos. And in a way, the attempt to re-architect the mobile experience was meant to be a remedy for that. But as we've described, we made some mistakes along the way. And so part of the reason that I can speak with some confidence about the progress we've made is that we have a really strong quantitative understanding of how the software platform is performing today relative to the previous generation software. Across dozens of metrics, the platform performs better than the software that it replaced.
Obviously that wasn't true six months ago, but it's true today. And we have a line of sight to a set of experiences that dramatically improves upon the experience that we were delivering going as far back as 2020.
There's a temptation, I think, for people to try to answer this question—is that a hardware company, is that a software company—but my inclination is to embrace both sides of that and just to remind everyone that we're a platform company. It's the magic of bringing those two things together that really differentiates us from what anybody else can do.
Can you talk about the feeling of coming into this role, and everything that happened with the app. Do you feel responsible for the way things went wrong? How do you reckon with it?
The answer is, absolutely I do. I was on the board and this happened, at least in part on my watch, and I think that none of us can walk away from the responsibility that we have.
It is part of the reason that I started showing up in our Boston office last August to sit with the engineers and try to deeply understand the technical challenges they were facing and to help them think about how they might organize their work. Then when we got to the point as a board and the opening days of 2025 and decided that the company needed new leadership, that I was willing to leave my old life—really, both my work and where we lived—and to come to Santa Barbara [to Sonos headquarters] and show up every day to get things going in the right direction. So yeah, I feel absolutely responsible. I think everyone here does.
I want to ask about Sonos' future. Are you expanding outside of the home, or is home audio the future? Oh, and are you worried about tariffs? How are you feeling about the general nature of Sonos' future?
I'm really optimistic about Sonos. At the moment, I'm the interim CEO, and I think that if there's anything that contains me with that word in front of CEO—that 'interim' word—it's that I think my mandate is to focus on the execution of the company over the course of the next, call it 18 to 24 months. Should the board decide I'm the permanent answer, it will feel great to be able to expand that vision to five years, to 10 years. I've got a whole bunch of ideas about where the company would go under my leadership, but let's take it one step at a time.