What Sonos’ CEO Is Saying Now—And What He’s Still Not
Four months into his role as interim CEO, Tom Conrad has been remarkably candid about Sonos’ catastrophic app launch. In recent interviews with WIRED and The Verge, he’s taken personal responsibility—even though he wasn’t at the helm, just on the board—acknowledged deep organizational problems, and outlined the company’s path forward.
But while Conrad is addressing more than many expected, some key details remain off-limits.
What Tom Conrad Is Now Saying
The interim CEO has been surprisingly direct about the scope of the failure. “We all feel really terrible about that,” he told WIRED, taking personal responsibility even though he was only a board member during the launch.
Conrad acknowledges three main categories of problems:
- Missing features that were cut to meet deadlines
- User experience changes that jarred longtime customers
- Performance issues that the company “just didn’t understand”
He’s been specific about the technical fixes, explaining that the latest updates dramatically improve performance on older devices like the PLAY:1 and PLAY:3. He’s also reorganized the company, cutting from “dozens” of initiatives to about 10 focused areas and creating dedicated software teams.
Perhaps most notably, Conrad has acknowledged that Sonos lost its way as a company. “I think perhaps we didn’t make the right level of investment in the platform software of Sonos,” he admits, framing the failed rewrite as an attempt to remedy years of neglect.
What Remains Unspoken
However, Conrad’s interviews still omit several key details that my reporting uncovered:
The content team distraction: He doesn’t mention that while core functionality was understaffed, Sonos had built a large team focused on content features like Sonos Radio—features that customers didn’t want and that generated minimal revenue.
However, Conrad does seem to acknowledge this misallocation implicitly. He told The Verge:
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.
This admission that software wasn’t a “first-class citizen” aligns with accounts from former employees—the core controls team remained understaffed while the content team grew.
The QA cuts: His interviews don’t address the layoffs in quality assurance and user research that happened shortly before launch, removing the very people whose job was to catch these problems.
The hardware coupling: He hasn’t publicly explained why the software overhaul was tied to the Ace headphones launch, creating artificial deadlines that forced teams to ship incomplete work.
The warnings ignored: There’s no mention of the engineers and designers who warned against launching, or how those warnings were overruled by business pressures.
A Different Kind of Transparency
Tom Conrad’s approach represents a middle ground between complete silence and full disclosure. He’s acknowledged fundamental strategic failures—“we didn’t make the right level of investment”—without diving into the specific decisions that led to them.
This partial transparency may be strategic—admitting to systemic problems while avoiding details that could expose specific individuals or departments to blame. It’s also possible that as interim CEO, Conrad is focused on moving forward rather than assigning retroactive accountability. And I get that.
The Path Forward
What’s most notable is how Conrad frames Sonos’ identity. He consistently describes it as a “platform company” rather than just a hardware maker, suggesting a more integrated approach to hardware and software development.
He’s also been direct about customer relationships: “It is really an honor to get to work on something that is so webbed into the emotional fabric of people’s lives,” he told WIRED, “but the consequence of that is when we fail, it has an emotional impact.”
An Ongoing Story
The full story of how Sonos created one of the tech industry’s most spectacular software failures may never be told publicly. Tom Conrad’s interviews provide the official version—a company that made mistakes but is now committed to doing better.
Whether that’s enough for customers who lived through the chaos will depend less on what Conrad says and more on what Sonos delivers. The app is improving, morale is reportedly better, and the company seems focused on its core strengths.
But the question remains: Has Sonos truly learned from what went wrong, or just how to talk about it better?
As Conrad told The Verge, when asked about becoming permanent CEO: “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.”
For now, fixing what’s broken takes precedence over explaining how it got that way. Whether that’s leadership or willful ignorance, only time will tell.
