Latest news with #TomConrad
Forbes
14-05-2025
- Forbes
5 Ways Sonos Can Fix The Mess
(Photo by Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images) Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe my loyalty is misguided. But I still love my Sonos system, despite the last 12 months being an absolute dumpster fire for the multi-room audio specialist. Between a patent grudge match with Google, a revamped app that broke more than it fixed, and a sneaky privacy-policy edit that quietly dropped 'we won't sell your data' from the US rules, Sonos users have been pretty livid and pretty vocal. Well, the ones on the Sonos forums and subreddits have been, at least. However, Sonos isn't blind to all this; it's well aware it messed up big time; hence a new interim CEO being put in place, cancelled products, and regular updates to improve the Sonos experience. There's still a way to go though - one year on from the disastrous app rollout - so here are five moves Sonos must make to win back our trust and steady the ship. We're still suffering through the aftermath of last year's new Sonos app. As the new interim CEO Tom Conrad admitted in a recent interview with The Verge, if the Sonos board had known how bad the performance bugs were, 'we never would have shipped it'. That doesn't really help us users though, who've had to endure months of constant crashes, missing features and flaky connectivity. Sonos has spent a year 'righting the ship' according to Conrad, who claims dramatic progress has been made in the last few months especially. And yes, those improvements have been noticed. My system seems more stable than it has been in months and the regular updates have added a bunch of missing features back into the mix. But we're still not even at a level that we were with the 'old' app 12 months ago. So those improvements need to continue at pace. Our multi-room speakers worked perfectly for years… we just want them to work perfectly again. (Photo by Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images) Sonos, apparently, just canceled its 'Pinewood' streaming-TV box and, if the rumors surrounding it were true, that's a good thing. No one wanted a $400 streaming box powered by an ad-tech company. The good news is that Conrad knows this, he's clearly focused on launching gear that's much more in line with what made Sonos great in the first place. There is speculation on the tech rumor mill that both an Era 100 follow-up and dedicated AV receiver are on the roadmap, and the company has just announced Hugo Barra is joining the board, which can only mean good things from an ecosystem point of view. The Sonos and Ikea partnership, which brought us some weird and wonderful Symfonisk speakers over the past few years, is officially coming to an end. That's a real shame because it represented a cheaper ticket to the Sonos party. Sonos should pick up that torch though. It recently brought the price of the Era 100 down from $249 to $199 to hit a 'magic spot,' but a sub- $100 speaker would be a surefire way of getting more people invested in the Sonos ecosystem. Within hours of the revamped app going live in May last year the Sonos community was up in arms. Initially though, Sonos stuck to its guns over the new app, towing the company line that it was in the users' best interests in the long run, and a Sonos chief product officer even stated it took 'courage' to launch the new app. Two weeks after launch the then CEO of Sonos, Patrick Spence, told The Verge: 'Everybody at Sonos has been testing it for months. It has delivered - we know from data and from feedback - that it is easier to navigate.' It was a communication tactic from Sonos that spectacularly backfired - and not even a public apology in July was enough to calm the Sonos community down. However, the past few months have seen a huge improvement on clarity and communication from Sonos, in particular on the Community Forum and the Sonos subreddit, where Keith Nieves, Social Media Program Lead for Sonos, has been putting out fires right, left and center. He even set up a public Trello board so Sonos users could keep track of app improvement plans and progress. Keith has regularly updated Sonos users during Office Hour sessions on Reddit, and Tom Conrad will actually be joining him for the next one, giving users the chance to speak directly to the new boss. Conrad also did the rounds of the major tech press publications recently to provide an update of what he's been doing in his first 100 days as the Sonos top-dog. It's this sort of transparency, and owning past (and indeed future) mistakes, that will help to get the Sonos community back onside. Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg The Sonos Ace headphones deserved better. By almost any measure they're excellent hardware – great battery life, strong ANC and transparency modes – but they got buried in the app PR nightmare. Conrad has stated that software missteps have hurt Ace sales, but he's not given up on the company's first headphones, stating that 'there's a lot we can do with software experiences to further differentiate Ace from other things in the market.' The Sonos Ace headphones have great potential but, as Conrad alluded to, Sonos needs to do more to set them apart from similarly-priced rivals. And obviously they also need to fix the app issues that held them back.
India Today
13-05-2025
- Business
- India Today
Sonos interim CEO says its app design failed to account for complexity people have in their home network
Sonos has finally admitted that the company relied largely on lab tests for its controversial app redesign instead of considering the complexity of real-world home networks, something that would eventually expose it to a bunch of issues and - even worse - customer backlash. The confession comes straight from interim chief executive officer, Tom Conrad, who spoke about this and a lot more, in an interview with app redesign was not a small thing. It was part of the company's bigger strategy to realign itself in an increasingly competitive market, especially with the launch of its maiden headphones, the Sonos Ace. The 'new' Sonos app in fact was actually launched just ahead of the big Ace global reveal last year. Though the core intent was to hype its first headphones, Sonos perhaps missed the bigger picture and, even worse, downplayed the backlash that came when users found missing features, laggy connections, and in some cases, broken accessibility. The experience, some might say, was uproar forced then-CEO Patrick Spence to make an apology and come up with a seven-part fix, before he stepped down. Conrad is his formal replacement, though the prefix 'interim' applied to his designation means this could only be temporary. Anyhow, the CEO of Sonos has spoken, and he has made some 'startling' comments about how Sonos was functioning leading into the app launch. Evidently, there were two big missteps. First, the company knowingly removed certain features from the app, assuming not many people used 'There was a set of lesser-used features that weren't implemented on the new software platform,' Conrad said. 'The company made a decision to launch with the intention of doing fast-follow releases that would bring that functionality under the fold.'Second, the app's user interface (UI) was changed drastically without realising how it would sit with users who liked and preferred simplicity and ease of use - the hallmark of any Sonos product. But the biggest mistake, according to Conrad, was assuming lab testing reflected real-life conditions.'We just have a much more profound understanding of the complex networking environments of our customers' homes,' he said. 'They live in apartments with literally a hundred access points competing for Wi-Fi signal strength They have surprising and esoteric network configurations that you wouldn't imagine.'Sonos also didn't fully consider how their system interacts with third-party services like Spotify and Apple Music across a range of old and new devices. Many customers are known to hold onto their devices for years, adding further complexity.'To be clear, if we'd known, we never would've shipped the software,' Conrad said. 'No reasonable person would've shipped the software if we had understood the reliability and performance characteristics of the product in our customers' homes.'advertisementHe added that the team feels 'really terrible' about what happened and has changed how it tests, collaborates, and prioritises updates to avoid repeating the same the oversight is a bit surprising. During a recent interview with India Today Tech, the General Manager of Sonos APAC, Rennie Addabbo, was candid about how the company has its ears on the ground and takes market research and feedback very seriously to make product and partnership decisions, all of which point to one direction, which is to bring joy to the customers. Some of the things, like how it tracks consumption habits from how and what people are consuming to the kind of homes they are buying speak of a brand that makes – or at least it is making – a lot of effort to catch the nerve and emotion of its target audience. Even beyond market dynamics, Sonos is a company where product decisions – even their naming – are decided by product people. It is not a marketing play like in some other brands.'There are a number of things that make Sonos unique in the consumer electronics space, but one thing I see is the product and engineering folks drive the bulk of these conversations – the naming conventions and the life cycle and longevity of products engineered deliberately from the start,' Rennie had said. 'Virtually all our product decisions and the naming convention included, they will come from our product group... it's the product folks of the world who are declaring their perspective on the engineering we've put into the device.'advertisementIt is a long road from there to where it says it prefers 'lab tests' over real word use cases. But be that as it may, what's clear is that Sonos has been listening. And Conrad seems honest. Within the company as well, he is deeply respected. 'It is easy to see, and we continue to talk about what our number one priority is and that's the experience itself. "That's been strengthened, if anything, since Tom joined us as CEO,' Rennie said, praising his 'long pedigree of software' and his understanding of the company. 'It's been a really positive sign to see Tom enroll and having the impact on the product team and the engineering team and the way he's having an immediate impact.'
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Sonos puts faith in software updates to restore trust
This story was originally published on CX Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CX Dive newsletter. Sonos is still working to rebuild customer trust following a disastrous app release in May 2024, executives said on a Q2 2025 earnings call Wednesday. A slate of recent updates were focused on improving stability, speed and usability, according to interim CEO Tom Conrad. Social sentiment is on the rise, while inbound support inquiries are down. 'My view here is simple: Our software must be responsive, reliable and intuitive,' Conrad said during the call. 'No exceptions.' Sonos has been working hard to win back customer trust through a seven-point plan released last year, but leaders still see plenty of work ahead and are focusing on software improvements for better customer experience. The company released nine software updates in the last 120 days, with more on the way, Conrad said. 'For the balance of the year, we are focused on using software to drive differentiation and experience improvements,' Conrad said. 'And we do this not just to repair our relationship with our customers after the missteps of last year, but also because our flywheel is powered by software.' Conrad, a Snap Inc. and Pandora veteran who sits on the Sonos board of directors, was tapped to help the speaker company fix its app last year and eventually took on the interim CEO role in January. Then-CEO Patrick Spence departed the company after taking ownership of the app issues, saying his 'push for speed backfired' during an earnings call last October. The app released in May 2024 suffered from user interface issues, including the lack of volume numbers. Sonos' seven-point plan called on the company to commit to an 'unwavering focus on the customer experience' and appoint a quality ombudsperson to make it easier for employees to escalate experience concerns to executives. Conrad's efforts so far have included reorganizing the company's product and engineering staff around key priorities, leading the company to layoff 200 employees, Conrad said on a February Q1 2025 earnings call. At the time, Conrad expressed confidence in the smaller, more efficient team's ability to improve Sonos' core experience. Sonos also ended its relationship with IKEA, and the companies will stop releasing new products together, Conrad said on the earnings call Wednesday. Sonos' exit from the partnership is another part of his effort to focus on improving the aspects of the business that matter the most. Revenue was up 3% year over year in the second quarter of 2025, and the company saw a strong response to a targeted promotion aimed at its install base, according to CFO Saori Casey. 'We believe this is a testament to the progress we have made improving our core experience and restoring our customers' trust,' Casey said during the call. The company reported a net loss of $70.1 million for the second quarter of 2025, up slightly from the $69.7 million net loss reported in the second quarter of 2024, according to a company earnings release.
WIRED
09-05-2025
- WIRED
Sonos CEO: ‘We All Feel Really Terrible' About the Bungled App Update
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 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.
Mint
09-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Sonos Interim CEO Says Company Has Turned a Corner and He Wants the Top Job
(Bloomberg) -- Sonos Inc. interim Chief Executive Officer Tom Conrad said the audio company has 'turned the corner' following setbacks caused by software issues — and that he wants to be named to the top job permanently. 'I'm just feeling much more confident that we've turned the corner,' he said in an interview Friday. 'We've made some real breakthroughs in the last 90 days on some deeply esoteric technical challenges.' The longtime board member stepped in as temporary chief in January after his predecessor, Patrick Spence, left following a failed app revamp mired the company in controversy. Last year, Sonos overhauled its iOS and Android apps — along with the underlying software that connects its hardware — and users immediately complained about interface issues, networking problems and equipment not being able to properly play music. The glitches upset many consumers who, in some cases, spent tens of thousands of dollars on Sonos systems placed throughout their homes. Conrad said the latest software release, pushed out this week, helps fix issues that have continued to hit older players — such as the Play 1 and Play 3 — unveiled over a decade ago. He said that releases coming out the rest of the year will help make Sonos' software 'better than it has been in five years.' By spending the past few months fixing the underlying software, the company is now focusing on improving the app's user experience, he said. 'Quantitatively today, the app performs better than the software it replaced,' he said, adding that upcoming releases across the summer and into early fall will 'restore convention' to the user experience and improve usability. 'I feel like we're on a really good path here.' The issues, he said, were difficult to fix because they were so wide-ranging. 'It's not like we made a straightforward set of mistakes where we could just go in and plug some obvious holes.' Conrad credits the turnaround to restructuring the way the company operates. Sonos previously was organized by business units, meaning there was one team for every product line. Now, the company is structured by functionality, meaning it's grouped into areas like hardware, software, design and operations. That mirrors Apple Inc.'s approach. (Besides sporting a Sonos tattoo, Conrad has one of a Mac on his arm.) The old structure 'made it hard for the team to prioritize experience across the business units, which is so fundamental to what Sonos is,' Conrad said. The company, he said, is now staffed for success, has a clear set of goals and a more defined line of escalation to top managers. This 'has unlocked the progress we've made on software and how the team is feeling about what they show up to do here,' he said. Conrad said Sonos hasn't fully determined how it will be impacted by tariffs the US has imposed on foreign imports, but that it stopped building products for the US market in China years ago, instead relying on Malaysia and Vietnam. Still, it's pulling forward manufacturing to bring hardware devices into the US while levies are stable ahead of anticipated changes, he said, because it's premature to try to figure out how this 'multidimensional problem' gets solved. And while Conrad is interim CEO, he is very clear about wanting to drop the first part of that title. 'I hope the next chapter is I get named permanent CEO and I get to lead the company on a 5-year or 10-year plan, not on a 2-year plan,' he said. 'I have big ideas and I can't wait to get going.' More stories like this are available on
