An in-depth interview with Sonos interim CEO Tom Conrad

It’s my final day at The Verge and Vox Media after over 13 years. And as luck should have it, I was able to wrap up my tenure here by interviewing Tom Conrad, the interim CEO of Sonos. I’ve covered this company more extensively than any other, and as our readers know, Sonos has been through the ringer over the last year — in a mess of its own making, to be clear. But over the last several months, Conrad, a Sonos board member since 2017, has kept the company laser-focused on a turnaround effort with frequent app improvements and bug fixes.

With successful stints at Pandora, Snap, and elsewhere, Conrad has deep software roots. (Yes, he was also the chief product officer at Quibi.) So on Friday, I threw my most pressing questions at the man who clearly hopes to become the permanent CEO of Sonos. We covered some of what I know Sonos’ Reddit community is likely curious about and other topics that seemed timely, and I came away encouraged about the company’s odds of getting back on track.

The below interview is lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tom Conrad, it’s great to finally meet. This week, you announced that the Symfonisk partnership with Ikea is no more. Talk about what led to that choice. You seem pretty keyed into the Sonos community, so I’m sure you saw some of the disappointed reactions. These speakers were great. And Sonos doesn’t have a $99 speaker in its lineup, which Ikea offered, and that seems important. What led to that decision in your mind?

You know, we put that partnership together eight years ago. And honestly, it’s been on sort of a slow trajectory to its end for years. One of the big things that I’ve done in my first 116 days is to try to catalog all of the things that the company is doing and to prioritize and to focus us on doing an appropriate number of things exceptionally well. I think every great company has to have that kind of focus. There are a number of things that we’ll be focused on going forward and a handful of things that we won’t. And to be honest, I think the wind down of the Ikea partnership was relatively easy to contemplate because, while on paper the price points that you’re talking about and so forth make a lot of sense, in practice, the scale of that business was quite small.

Do you see Sonos filling that gap in the future in regards to unique form factors? Or do you think this is it as far as lamp and picture frame speakers go?

What I’m focused on is delivering high value, differentiated products. And so you take something like the Era 100, which is just like, clearly the best in class sort of speaker that you can buy in that price category. And since I arrived, we brought the price of that down from $249 to $199, which we think is really a magic spot for delivering something that’s completely differentiated in the market, has tons of value that builds over time, and is a great gateway into the platform. We also have Roam, which is often discounted down to $139 or less, as another way to come into the Sonos experience.

On the disastrous app release

Obviously we have to talk about the app situation. It’s been one year. You were on the board for the whole time. I’ve talked to many people who were like, “They knew. They knew and they shipped it anyway.” So what measures are in place now where anyone at the company can say, “Hey, there’s a problem here. We need to pause.” What have you learned?

Let’s see. Let’s talk about what we knew just briefly. I think that there were three or four kind of things that were problematic about the launch of the new version of the platform. The first couple, I would call them the mistakes that we knew we were making. We knew that there were some features that we were gonna roll out in incremental — what we intended to be fast-follow releases. Add the alarm clock, add snooze, do better with accessibility. And the company made a… made a decision to launch and to sort of do that incrementally over time.

Second thing is, anytime you make a set of user experience changes, you know that there’s going to be some fraction of your audience that doesn’t like them. And this is like a universal truth of software, and I think the company, because we’d done a bunch of work in the usability setting, was convinced that — oftentimes companies convince themselves of this — that it was for the greater good and we would sort of get through to the other side. I think the third mistake was one that we just didn’t understand. And that was that, obviously, in the real world, the product had material performance and reliability issues.

Just to be completely concrete about it, if the company had known, we never would have shipped it. No reasonable team would have shipped it. You can critique us for not knowing, but it’s not like we intentionally launched understanding we would have the in-the-field performance issues we did.

And the last thing is, we should’ve had a mechanism to roll back. And for a variety of reasons, it took us a while to figure out the depth of the problem, and by the time that time had passed, we couldn’t.

We have spent a year righting the ship. And we made good progress, I think, by the end of last year — and I think we’ve made really dramatic progress in the last 120 days.

You think you know Wi-Fi problems? Ask Sonos

How so? What’s changed?

One of the things is the work that we’ve done to reorganize the team and to put exactly the right people and capacity and focus on, not just the app codebase, but also the whole platform (player software, the cloud) has allowed us to unlock some of the more lingering, esoteric issues that remained. So the release that’s making its way to our customers right now — new version of the apps, new version of the player software — is beginning to get at some of those lingering issues, which I’d put into two categories.

There’s a category of issues that are particularly tied to the Play:1 and Play:3, which are 13- and 11-year-old architectures at this point. It’s sort of amazing to think that the iPhone was in market when the Play:3 launched was the iPhone 4. Its halo feature was it had a selfie cam for the first time. So a lot has changed in tech since we shipped the Play:3, but fully a third of our households still have players from that generation that they love and they want to work, and we’re doing the hard work today of making sure that they have a great experience. This release that’s launching right now dramatically improves on the experience that they’ll have. In fact, quantitatively the experience is better than it was on those devices four years ago. So, far before the app itself. But we’ve got a bead on another set of enhancements that’s gonna take us even further over the spring and summer.

And then the second category of lingering issues is… I talk to a lot of people on social. I talk to a lot of people who show up in my inbox. And their issues today, truly, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say, 100 percent of the time come down to one of two things: an older player or some kind of esoteric networking reality in their home. Unfortunately, they often report (rightly), “My network’s great. I have no problem with anything else. It’s just Sonos.” And the the root cause there — and I don’t want to suggest this isn’t our problem to solve — but the root cause there is the only infrastructure in their home that wants to talk on their local network at very low latency in a sort of mesh is Sonos.

Everything else is like point-to-point to the internet. Your Apple TV, it goes to the internet and gets something back. Even your Nest thermostats. They don’t talk to each other. They talk to the internet, you know? They talk to the cloud and get their settings and all that. But Sonos, because it’s this like, real-time experience that needs to keep you know, music synchronized to the millisecond, needs volume latency that’s real time… all of your devices are kind of constantly talking to one another and staying synchronized on the local network.

And that means that if… what’s a good example? You’re a Comcast customer. You’ve got Comcast Wi-Fi. You don’t like your Comcast Wi-Fi that much. You go to Best Buy and you buy a bunch of Eeros and you bring them home and you set them up. And in the process of setting them up, you give them the same SSID as your old network, but you don’t turn off the Wi-Fi on your old network. Now you have two networks, and the same name, and the same password. Things power bounce, and cycle and get updates and all the rest of it. And half your Sonos speakers come up on your old network and half come up on the new network. They can’t talk to each other at all. The app is on one of the two networks; it can only see half of them. It seems completely chaotic because of that, the real solve there is to turn Wi-Fi off in your Comcast router.

And look, part of the promise and magic of Sonos is that our customers shouldn’t have to be network administrators. But some of the problems that we see commonly today come down to issues that we need to help them troubleshoot on their local network. We have a bunch of things in progress today that will put the power back in our customers’ hands to sort of understand what’s going on in their network in a more sophisticated way.

I don’t mean to overstate this. These are problems that maybe 1 percent of our households have. But 1 percent of households is 150,000 people, and apparently they’re all on Reddit.

The self-sabotaged Ace headphones

One casualty, so to speak, of all this was the Sonos Ace headphones. They arrived at the worst possible time alongside the overhauled app that blew up and fell apart. Sales early on were not great. Have you seen signs of that turning around? How do you save the Ace? Because they are really good headphones, but they just kind of got sidelined by this whole situation.

I’m really committed to Ace. I think it’s a fantastic product, and thank you for the compliment. Out of the gate, for us to deliver battery life, transparency, noise canceling, and comfort that we did relative to the competition, I’m really proud of. I think you’re right that the cloud of the app missteps impacted Ace. I’m excited about continuing to innovate in that space both through hardware and software. I think there’s a lot we can do with software experiences to further differentiate Ace from other things in the market. In time, we’re gonna get back on our footing with respect to the software quality.

At the highest level, it’s not that complicated. I want the same thing that you want, Chris: I just want it to work. You launch the app, it quickly gives you access to your content, you start something playing back, and you’re done! I have no ambition for people to spend their life in the Sonos app fidgeting with esoteric failures. And all of that’s within our grasp — increasingly so. We’re getting back to that, and then we can get back to the business of creating these innovative, differentiated experiences.

Speaking of software, let’s talk about paywalls and subscriptions. That’s one topic that your customer base is very antsy about. I’ve heard that a few years ago, Sonos came very close to putting advanced features behind a paywall. How does Tom Conrad feel about subscriptions? Do you promise to keep all the core Sonos functions free?

I think you’d be hard-pressed to find existence proof that in hardware land, customers respond well to… the heated seats in my BMW require a monthly subscription. Or, the poor Logitech CEO who just speculated in your publication that maybe there’ll be a subscription mouse someday. And somewhere, right this second, they’re still getting taken apart in a Reddit thread about that.

So while it’s certainly true that Sonos continues to deliver new, incremental value to customers over time — sometimes a decade after they had a financial transaction with us — I think it’s kind of the life we’ve chosen, Chris. That’s not to say that it’s impossible that we wouldn’t have some kind of ongoing financial relationship with our customers. But, we’re not going to put grouping behind a paywall.

That’s all I wanted to hear, basically.

Pinewood: the canceled video player

So, I’m not sure how much you want to talk about a product that, uh, didn’t technically exist and then theoretically got canceled. But there was obviously a ton of speculation about video for a while with Sonos. Pinewood. So, I’d imagine that was canceled because you want to focus on the app for now. But how do you feel about video in 2025? Is that still somewhere you see Sonos going in the future, or is it a case where, for as long as you can see, top-tier audio products are the focus?

I mean, you’re right, that I don’t really want to talk about hypothetical products that may or may not have been canceled. You’re also right to say that part of the leadership perspective I brought to the company is this idea that we need to be focused on things that we can be really exceptional and differentiated at. Insofar as things that we are not focused on anymore, it’s really through that lens of prioritization. And I think that’s really helped the company.

People inside Sonos care deeply about our customers. It’s a little hard to see that in a year where we stumbled so badly. But the toll of letting our customers down the way we did last year was really palpable in the company when I had my first day 116 days ago or whatever it was.

Part of what I think added to the despair was this sense that they were struggling to understand “what are our priorities? How are we going to get all this done? How can I be confident that I’m showing up every day contributing to something that matters?” It’s not an exaggeration to say that there were dozens of initiatives and programs fractionally invested in when I came in the door. And one of the things I did right away was to inventory that work and prioritize it against a set of strategic perspectives of where we could be really differentiated in the world and take it down to a smaller number.

And so now, we’re working on, it’s literally 11 sort of lanes of execution, which isn’t to say 11 products. Sort of 11 themes if you like, with well understood, dedicated teams to each. Each responsible for their own sort of prioritization and perspective about where to take that avenue. In addition to making great progress on restoring performance and reliability for our customers, I think it’s this renewed sense of focus that’s brought the company to a renewed sense of optimism and energy.

I’m not sure if you know any Sonos employees. But if you did, I hope that you’re hearing from them that we’ve turned a bit of a corner in that regard.

I wouldn’t say, you used one word that I’ll correct. I wouldn’t say that the changes we made were so we could focus on the app so much. We certainly have a bunch of exciting, innovative hardware expressions of Sonos that we continue to work on. But it is the case that… I think there’s this funny kind of debate of “is Sonos a hardware company or is Sonos a software company?” Almost as if those are the only choices. I think, truly, we are a platform company. In fact, we might be in our customers’ homes, truly, the third compute platform. They have a personal computer, they have a phone, and then they have a mesh of Sonos compute that we can do things with.

And as a platform company, there is a really important software component. And I think in a way, if you look at the last six or seven years, we entered portables and we entered headphones and we entered the professional sort of space with software expressions, we wouldn’t as focused as we might have been on the platform-ness of Sonos. So finding a way to make our software platform a first-class citizen inside of Sonos is a big part of what I’m doing here.

Giving customers the surround sound flexibility they want

Sonos customers are super adamant about wanting to make their own surround sound speaker configurations. That was apparently going to be part of the appeal of said product that may or may not have been canceled. It seems like you’re dropping some teases on Reddit about some new stuff coming soon. Can you talk about that? What’s to come as far as letting people take more control over their system and use whatever speaker for whatever purpose they want?

I certainly think it’s a really interesting lane of innovation and sound expression in home theater. If you talk to Giles Martin, our sound experience architect, he will tell you that the best theater experiences… he says they’re like a mullet, where there’s like a lot that happens kind of behind you and and what happens in front of you is a more focused expression. And so, while the sort of very traditional view of home theater is some satellites on either side on the left and the right and some stuff behind you, that can be a little bit of a trap about this idea of putting too much in front of you on the left and the right. And so we’re really focused, yes, on listening to the kind of feedback that you get in places like Reddit about traditional 5.1 expression. But we also want to do it in a way that really does add to the sound experience and not just the psychology of that cohort. So, stay tuned.

The Sonos and Google relationship

Fair enough. Let’s talk about Google. You’re still in court cases with them. Do you want to fix that relationship? Do you see them as a valuable partner when it comes to voice and eventually AI? How do you see that playing out in the coming months and years?

You know, we continue to work through that complicated relationship. I don’t know that I have a lot to say there. We do have some cases that are pending and getting ready to go into their next phase.

I would love to find… I would love to see them express energy that they want to come out the other side of this. But it’s sort of up to them.

What’re you most excited about over your next 100 days? You want to be the next permanent CEO, is what I’ve gathered.

I do. I do. The board has a fairly immense responsibility here to run a thoughtful process and make sure they find the best person in the world to be the next CEO of Sonos. And so I’m just kind of letting that process play out. I know they have a slate of remarkable candidates, and in the end, I hope that it’s me. But what I most hope for is that they find truly the best person in the world to do the job.

I do think that one difference between an interim CEO and a permanent CEO is, an interim CEO’s mandate is mostly to focus on the short and medium term. You know, getting the team aligned to execute with clarity and purpose for the next, call it 18 months or two years.

I think, on the day that the board asks me to be the permanent CEO, it will be fun to be able to unlock my perspective on where we go in the next five and 10 years. I’ve got a bunch of big ideas about that, but they’re a little bit on the shelf behind me for the moment until I get the go-ahead.

Last question. This is my last interview at The Verge, so thank you for the time. You said this week that for the balance of 2025, software is going to be your focus. But let’s tease something here. Is Sonos done with hardware for 2025?

Sonos is done with hardware for fiscal 25, which runs through the end of the third calendar quarter. I’ll just say this: we had a chance to talk to the company about the software and hardware roadmap for the next 18 months recently, and the word that came back to me from the company is, it’s the most excited they’ve felt about Sonos in years. So while I can’t wait for the moment where we can begin to express that longer-term vision that I was hinting at, I’m also really excited about what we’re going to do for our customers over the course of the next 18 months or so.