Interim Sonos CEO Tom Conrad said in an interview that two of the unpopular decisions the company made were deliberate, but the biggest problem was that it failed to understand how its products were used in the real world.
Conrad said that Sonos would never have released the new app had it fully appreciated the difference between its lab testing environment and real homes …
The disastrous story of the new Sonos app
In May of last year, Sonos launched the company’s first headphones, the Ace, intended to compete with AirPods Max. The app needed to be updated to support these, and the company decided to use it as an opportunity for a ground-up rebuild, launching a completely new app just ahead of the launch.
Things did not go well. Customers were upset at the company removing much-loved features, and many owners of older Sonos speakers experienced connection problems and lag. Given that the whole idea of Sonos is an Apple-esque It Just Works, customers were understandably angry at the company – even more so when it turned out to break accessibility too.
Sonos initially downplayed the complaints, but CEO Patrick Spence subsequently emailed customers to apologize, and provide a timeline for fixes, subsequently making seven promises before leaving the company. Fellow board member Tom Conrad was appointed as interim CEO while the company looked for a permanent replacement.
Two mistakes were deliberate
Conrad told Wired that the company deliberately did two things which he describes as “sort of a mistake.” First, it knew the new launch version of the app was missing functionality which wasn’t used by many, but was very important to those who did use it.
There was 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, it radically changed the UI, without fully appreciating how unpopular this would prove.
But Sonos didn’t understand real-world use
However, he says the biggest mistake of all was mistaking lab conditions for the real world. Things that were reliable in the lab were anything but in actual homes.
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.
Conrad says the company’s failure was not that it didn’t care, but that it failed to properly test all these variables.
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 customers’ homes.
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.
Conrad may remain as CEO
While his appointment was pitched as a temporary one, he indicates that he’d like to stay.
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.
9to5Mac’s Take
While taking responsibility and explaining what went wrong is a start, it still seems astonishing that the company didn’t conduct more widescale testing in real-life setups before launching the new app. It’s going to take a lot more time for the company to regain the trust of its longstanding customers.
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