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6 posts tagged with “product management”

Miquad Jaffer, a product leader at OpenAI shares his 4D method on how to build AI products that users want. In summary, it’s…

  • Discover: Find and prioritize real user pain points and friction in daily workflows.
  • Design: Make AI features invisible and trustworthy, fitting naturally into users’ existing habits.
  • Develop: Build AI systematically, with robust evaluation and clear plans for failures or edge cases.
  • Deploy: Treat each first use like a product launch, ensuring instant value and building user trust quickly.
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OpenAI Product Leader: The 4D Method to Build AI Products That Users Actually Want

An OpenAI product leader's complete playbook to discover real user friction, design invisible AI, plan for failure cases, and go from "cool demo" to "daily habit"

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Brian Balfour, writing for the Reforge blog:

Speed isn’t just about shipping faster, it’s about accelerating your entire learning metabolism. The critical metric isn’t feature velocity but rather your speed through the complete Insight → Act → Learn loop. This distinction separates products that compound advantages from those that compound technical debt.

The point being that now with AI, product teams are shipping faster. And those who aren’t might get lapped (to use an F1 phrase).

When Speed Becomes Table Stakes: 5 Improvements to Accelerate Insight to Action

In a world where traditional moats can evaporate in weeks rather than years, speed has transformed from competitive advantage to baseline requirement—yet here lies the paradox: while building and shipping have never been faster, the insights to fuel that building remain trapped in months-long archaeological expeditions through disconnected tools.

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Great reminder from Kai Wong about getting stuck on a solution too early:

Imagine this: the Product Manager has a vision of a design solution based on some requirements and voices it to the team. They say, “I want a table that allows us to check statuses of 100 devices at once.”

You don’t say anything, so that sets the anchor of a design solution as “a table with a bunch of devices and statuses.”

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Avoid premature solutions: how to respond when stakeholders ask for certain designs

How to avoid anchoring problems that result in stuck designers

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Comic-book style painting of the Sonos CEO Tom Conrad

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.

Closeup of a man with glasses, with code being reflected in the glasses

From Craft to Curation: Design Leadership in the Age of AI

In a recent podcast with partners at startup incubator Y Combinator, Jared Friedman, citing statistics from a survey with their current batch of founders says, “[The] crazy thing is one quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated, which is like an insane statistic. And it’s not like we funded a bunch of non-technical founders. Like every one of these people is highly tactical, completely capable of building their own product from scratch a year ago…”

A comment they shared from founder Leo Paz reads, “I think the role of Software Engineer will transition to Product Engineer. Human taste is now more important than ever as codegen tools make everyone a 10x engineer.”

Still from a YouTube video that shows a quote from Leo Paz

While vibe coding—the new term coined by Andrej Karpathy about coding by directing AI—is about leveraging AI for programming, it’s a window into what will happen to the software development lifecycle as a whole and how all the disciplines, including product management and design will be affected.

A skill inversion trend is happening. Being great at execution is becoming less valuable when AI tools can generate deliverables in seconds. Instead, our value as product professionals is shifting from mastering tools like Figma or languages like JavaScript, to strategic direction. We’re moving from the how to the what and why; from craft to curation. As Leo Paz says, “human taste is now more important than ever.”

The Traditional Value Hierarchy

The industry has been used to the model of unified teams for software development for the last 15–20 years. Product managers define requirements, manage the roadmap, and align stakeholders. Designers focus on the user interface, ensure visual appeal and usability, and prototype solutions. Engineers design the system architecture and then build the application via quality code.

For each of the core disciplines, execution was paramount. (Arguably, product management has always been more strategic, save for ticket writing.) Screens must be pixel-perfect and code must be efficient and bug-free.

The Forces Driving Inversion

Vibe Coding and Vibe Design

With new AI tools like Cursor and Lovable coming into the mix, the nature of implementation fundamentally changes. In Karpathy’s tweet about vibe coding, he says, “…I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.” He’s telling the LLM what he wants—his intent—and the AI delivers, with some cajoling. Jakob Nielsen picks up on this thread and applies it to vibe design. “Vibe design applies similar AI-assisted principles to UX design and user research, by focusing on high-level intent while delegating execution to AI.”

He goes on:

…vibe design emphasizes describing the desired feeling or outcome of a design, and letting AI propose the visual or interactive solutions​. Rather than manually drawing every element, a designer might say to an AI tool, “The interface feels a bit too formal; make it more playful and engaging,” and the AI could suggest color changes, typography tweaks, or animation accents to achieve that vibe. This is analogous to vibe coding’s natural language prompts, except the AI’s output is a design mockup or updated UI style instead of code.

This sounds very much like creative direction to me. It’s shaping the software. It’s using human taste to make it better.

Acceleration of Development Cycles

The founder of TrainLoop also says in the YC survey that his coding has sped up one-hundred-fold since six months ago. He says, “I’m no longer an engineer. I’m a product person.”

This means that experimentation is practically free. What’s the best way of creating a revenue forecasting tool? You can whip up three prototypes in about 10 minutes using Lovable and then get them in front of users. Of course, designers have always had the power to explore and create variations for an interface. But to have three functioning prototypes in 10 minutes? Impossible.

With this new-found coding superpower, the idea of bespoke, personal software is starting to take off. Non-coders like The New York Times’ Kevin Roose are using AI to create apps just for themselves, like an app that recommends what to pack his son for lunch based on the contents of his fridge. This is an evolution of the low-code/no-code movement of recent years. The gap between idea to reality is literally 10 minutes.

Democratization of Creation

Designer Tommy Geoco has a running series on his YouTube channel called “Build Wars” where he invites a couple of designers to battle head-to-head on the same assignment. In a livestream in late February, he and his cohosts had a professional web designer Brett Williams square off against 19 year-old Lovable marketer Henrik Westerlund. Their assignment was to build a landing page for a robotics company in 45 minutes, and they would be judged on design quality, execution quality, interactive quality, and strategic approach.

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Forty-five minutes to design and build a cohesive landing page is not enough time. Similar to TV cooking competitions, this artificial time constraint forced the two competitors to focus on what mattered and to use their time strategically. In the end, the professional designer won, but the commentators were impressed by how much a young marketer with little design experience could accomplish with AI tools in such a short time, suggesting a fundamental shift in how websites may be created in the future.

Cohost Tom Johnson suggested that small teams using AI tools will outcompete enterprises resistant to adopt them, “Teams that are pushing back on these new AI tools… get real… this is the way that things are going to go. You’re going to get destroyed by a team of 10 or five or one.”

The Maturation Cycle of Specialized Skills

“UX and UX people used to be special, but now we have become normal,” says Jakob Nielsen in a recent article about the decline of ROI from UX work. For enterprises, product or user experience design is now baseline. AI will dramatically increase the chances that young startups, too, will employ UX best practices.

Obviously, with AI, engineering is more accessible, but so are traditional product management processes. ChatGPT can write a pretty good PRD. Dovetail’s AI-powered insights supercharges customer discovery. And yes, why not use ChatGPT to write user stories and Jira tickets?

The New Value Hierarchy

From Technical Execution to Strategic Direction & Taste Curation

In the AI-augmented product development landscape, articulating vision and intent becomes significantly more valuable than implementation skills. While AI can generate better and better code and design assets, it can’t determine what is worth building or why.

Mike Krieger, cofounder of Instagram and now Chief Product Officer at Anthropic, identifies this change clearly. He believes the true bottleneck in product development is shifting to “alignment, deciding what to build, solving real user problems, and figuring out a cohesive product strategy.” These are all areas he describes as “very human problems” that we’re “at least three years away from models solving.”

This makes taste and judgement even more important. When everyone can generate good-enough, decent work via AI, having a strong point of view becomes a differentiator. To repeat Leo Paz, “Human taste is now more important than ever as codegen tools make everyone a 10x engineer.” The ability to recognize and curate quality outputs becomes as valuable as creating them manually.

This transformation manifests differently across disciplines but follows the same pattern:

  • Product managers shift from writing detailed requirements to articulating problems worth solving and recognizing valuable solutions
  • Designers transition from pixel-level execution to providing creative direction that guides AI-generated outputs
  • Engineers evolve from writing every line of code to focusing on architecture, quality standards, and system design Each role maintains its core focus while delegating much of the execution to AI tools. The skill becomes knowing what to ask for rather than how to build it—a fundamental reorientation of professional value.

From Process Execution to User Understanding

In a scene from the film "Blade Runner," replicant Leon Kowalski can't quite understand how to respond to the situation about the incapacitated tortoise.

In a scene from the film Blade Runner, replicant Leon Kowalski can’t quite understand how to respond to the situation about the incapacitated tortoise.

While AI is great at summarizing mountains of text, it can’t yet replicate human empathy or understand nuanced user needs. The human ability to interpret context, detect unstated problems, and understand emotional responses remains irreplaceable.

Nielsen emphasizes this point when discussing vibe coding and design: “Building the right product remains a human responsibility, in terms of understanding user needs, prioritizing features, and crafting a great user experience.” Even as AI handles more implementation, the work of understanding what users need remains distinctly human.

Research methodologies are evolving to leverage AI’s capabilities while maintaining human insight:

  • AI tools can process and analyze massive amounts of user feedback
  • Platforms like Dovetail now offer AI-powered insights from user research
  • However, interpreting this data and identifying meaningful patterns still requires human judgment

The gap between what users say they want and what they actually need remains a space where human intuition and empathy create tremendous value. Those who excel at extracting these insights will become increasingly valuable as AI handles more of the execution.

From Specialized to Cross-Functional

The traditional boundaries between product disciplines are blurring as AI lowers the barriers between the specialized areas of expertise. This transformation is enabling more fluid, cross-functional files and changing how teams collaborate.

The aforementioned YC podcast highlights this evolution with Leo Paz’s observation that software engineers will become product engineers. The YC founders who are using AI-generated code are already reaping the benefits. They act more like product people and talk to more customers so they can understand them better and build better products.

Concrete examples of this cross-functionality are already emerging:

  • Designers can now generate functional prototypes without developer assistance using tools like Lovable
  • Product managers can create basic UI mockups to communicate their ideas more effectively
  • Engineers can make design adjustments directly rather than waiting for design handoffs

This doesn’t mean that all specialization disappears. As Diana Hu from YC notes:

Zero-to-one will be great for vibe coding where founders can ship features very quickly. But once they hit product market fit, they’re still going to have a lot of really hardcore systems engineering, where you need to get from the one to n and you need to hire very different kinds of people.

The result is a more nuanced specialization landscape. Early-stage products benefit from generalists who can work across domains with AI assistance. As products mature, deeper expertise remains valuable but is focused on different aspects: system architecture rather than implementation details, information architecture rather than UI production, product strategy rather than feature specification.

Team structures are evolving in response:

  • Smaller, more fluid teams with less rigid role definitions
  • T-shaped skills becoming increasingly valuable—depth in one area with breadth across others
  • New collaboration models replacing traditional waterfall handoffs
  • Emerging hybrid roles that combine traditionally separate domains

The most competitive teams will find the right balance between AI capabilities and human direction, creating new workflows that leverage both. As Johnson warned in the Build Wars competition, “Teams that are pushing back on these new AI tools, get real! This is the way that things are going to go. You’re going to get destroyed by a team of 10 or five or one.”

The ability to adapt across domains is becoming a meta-skill in itself. Those who can navigate multiple disciplines while maintaining a consistent vision will thrive in this new environment where execution is increasingly delegated to artificial intelligence.

Thriving in the Inverted Landscape

The future is already here. AI is fundamentally inverting the skill hierarchy in product development, creating opportunities for those willing to adapt.

Product professionals who succeed in this new landscape will be those who embrace this inversion rather than resist it. This means focusing less on execution mechanics and more on the strategic and human elements that AI cannot replicate: vision, judgment, and taste.

For product managers, double down on developing the abilities to extract profound insights from user conversations and articulate clear, compelling problem statements. Your value will increasingly come from knowing which problems are worth solving rather than specifying how to solve them. AI also can’t align stakeholders and prioritize the work.

For designers, invest in strengthening your design direction skills. The best designers will evolve from skilled craftspeople to visionaries who can guide AI toward creating experiences that resonate emotionally with users. Develop your critical eye and the language to articulate what makes a design succeed or fail. Remember that design has always been about the why.

For engineers, emphasize systems thinking and architecture over implementation details. Your unique value will come from designing resilient, scalable systems and making critical technical decisions that AI cannot yet make autonomously.

Across all roles, three meta-skills will differentiate the exceptional from the merely competent:

  • Prompt engineering: The ability to effectively direct AI tools
  • Judgment and taste development: The discernment to recognize quality and make value-based decisions
  • Cross-functional fluency: The capacity to work effectively across traditional role boundaries

We’re seeing the biggest shift in how we build products since agile came along. Teams are getting smaller and more flexible. Specialized roles are blurring together. And product cycles that used to take months now take days.

There is a silver lining. We can finally focus on what actually matters: solving real problems for real people. By letting AI handle the grunt work, we can spend our time understanding users better and creating things that genuinely improve their lives.

Companies that get this shift will win big. Those that reorganize around these new realities first will pull ahead. But don’t wait too long—as Nielsen points out, this “land grab” won’t last forever. Soon enough, everyone will be working this way.

The future belongs to people who can set the vision and direct AI to make it happen, not those hanging onto skills that AI is rapidly taking over. Now’s the time to level up how you think about products, not just how you build them. In this new world, your strategic thinking and taste matter more than your execution skills.

A cut-up Sonos speaker against a backdrop of cassette tapes

When the Music Stopped: Inside the Sonos App Disaster

The fall of Sonos isn’t as simple as a botched app redesign. Instead, it is the cumulative result of poor strategy, hubris, and forgetting the company’s core value proposition. To recap, Sonos rolled out a new mobile app in May 2024, promising “an unprecedented streaming experience.” Instead, it was a severely handicapped app, missing core features and broke users’ systems. By January 2025, that failed launch wiped nearly $500 million from the company’s market value and cost CEO Patrick Spence his job.

What happened? Why did Sonos go backwards on accessibility? Why did the company remove features like sleep timers and queue management? Immediately after the rollout, the backlash began to snowball into a major crisis.

A collage of torn newspaper-style headlines from Bloomberg, Wired, and The Verge, all criticizing the new Sonos app. Bloomberg’s headline states, “The Volume of Sonos Complaints Is Deafening,” mentioning customer frustration and stock decline. Wired’s headline reads, “Many People Do Not Like the New Sonos App.” The Verge’s article, titled “The new Sonos app is missing a lot of features, and people aren’t happy,” highlights missing features despite increased speed and customization.

As a designer and longtime Sonos customer who was also affected by the terrible new app, a little piece of me died inside each time I read the word “redesign.” It was hard not to take it personally, knowing that my profession could have anything to do with how things turned out. Was it really Design’s fault?

Even after devouring dozens of news articles, social media posts, and company statements, I couldn’t get a clear picture of why the company made the decisions it did. I cast a net on LinkedIn, reaching out to current and former designers who worked at Sonos. This story is based on hours of conversations between several employees and me. They only agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity. I’ve also added context from public reporting.

The shape of the story isn’t much different than what’s been reported publicly. However, the inner mechanics of how those missteps happened are educational. The Sonos tale illustrates the broader challenges that most companies face as they grow and evolve. How do you modernize aging technology without breaking what works? How do public company pressures affect product decisions? And most importantly, how do organizations maintain their core values and user focus as they scale?

It Just Works

Whenever I moved into a new home, I used to always set up the audio system first. Speaker cable had to be routed under the carpet, along the baseboard, or through walls and floors. To get speakers in the right place, cable management was always a challenge, especially with a surround setup. Then Sonos came along and said, “Wires? We don’t need no stinking wires.” (OK, so they didn’t really say that. Their first wireless speaker, the PLAY:5, was launched in late 2009.)

I purchased my first pair of Sonos speakers over ten years ago. I had recently moved into a modest one-bedroom apartment in Venice, and I liked the idea of hearing my music throughout the place. Instead of running cables, setting up the two PLAY:1 speakers was simple. At the time, you had to plug into Ethernet for the setup and keep at least one component hardwired in. But once that was done, adding the other speaker was easy.

The best technology is often invisible. It turns out that making it work this well wasn’t easy. According to their own history page, in its early days, the company made the difficult decision to build a distributed system where speakers could communicate directly with each other, rather than relying on central control. It was a more complex technical path, but one that delivered a far better user experience. The founding team spent months perfecting their mesh networking technology, writing custom Linux drivers, and ensuring their speakers would stay perfectly synced when playing music.

A network architecture diagram for a Sonos audio system, showing Zone Players, speakers, a home network, and various audio sources like a computer, MP3 store, CD player, and internet connectivity. The diagram includes wired and wireless connections, a WiFi handheld controller, and a legend explaining connection types. Handwritten notes describe the Zone Player’s ability to play, fetch, and store MP3 files for playback across multiple zones. Some elements, such as source converters, are crossed out.

As a new Sonos owner, a concept that was a little challenging to wrap my head around was that the speaker is the player. Instead of casting music from my phone or computer to the speaker, the speaker itself streamed the music from my network-attached storage (NAS, aka a server) or streaming services like Pandora or Spotify.

One of my sources told me about the “beer test” they had at Sonos. If you’re having a house party and run out of beer, you could leave the house without stopping the music. This is a core Sonos value proposition.

A Rat’s Nest: The Weight of Tech Debt

The original Sonos technology stack, built carefully and methodically in the early 2000s, had served the company well. Its products always passed the beer test. However, two decades later, the company’s software infrastructure became increasingly difficult to maintain and update. According to one of my sources, who worked extensively on the platform, the codebase had become a “rat’s nest,” making even simple changes hugely challenging.

The tech debt had been accumulating for years. While Sonos continued adding features like Bluetooth playback and expanding its product line, the underlying architecture remained largely unchanged. The breaking point came with the development of the Sonos Ace headphones. This major new product category required significant changes to how the Sonos app handled device control and audio streaming.

Rather than tackle this technical debt incrementally, Sonos chose to completely rewrite its mobile app. This “clean slate” approach was seen as the fastest way to modernize the platform. But as many developers know, complete refactors are notoriously risky. And unlike in its early days, when the company would delay launches to get things right—famously once stopping production lines over a glue issue—this time Sonos seemed determined to push forward regardless of quality concerns.

Set Up for Failure

The rewrite project began around 2022 and would span approximately two years. The team did many things right initially—spending a year and a half conducting rigorous user testing and building functional prototypes using SwiftUI. According to my sources, these prototypes and tests validated their direction—the new design was a clear improvement over the current experience. The problem wasn’t the vision. It was execution.

A wave of new product managers, brought in around this time, were eager to make their mark but lacked deep knowledge of Sonos’s ecosystem. One designer noted it was “the opposite of normal feature creep”—while product designers typically push for more features, in this case they were the ones advocating for focusing on the basics.

As a product designer, this role reversal is particularly telling. Typically in a product org, designers advocate for new features and enhancements, while PMs act as a check on scope creep, ensuring we stay focused on shipping. When this dynamic inverts—when designers become the conservative voice arguing for stability and basic functionality—it’s a major red flag. It’s like architects pleading to fix the foundation while the clients want to add a third story. The fact that Sonos’s designers were raising these alarms, only to be overruled, speaks volumes about the company’s shifting priorities.

The situation became more complicated when the app refactor project, codenamed Passport, was coupled to the hardware launch schedule for the Ace headphones. One of my sources described this coupling of hardware and software releases as “the Achilles heel” of the entire project. With the Ace’s launch date set in stone, the software team faced immovable deadlines for what should have been a more flexible development timeline. This decision and many others, according to another source, were made behind closed doors, with individual contributors being told what to do without room for discussion. This left experienced team members feeling voiceless in crucial technical and product decisions. All that careful research and testing began to unravel as teams rushed to meet the hardware schedule.

This misalignment between product management and design was further complicated by organizational changes in the months leading up to launch. First, Sonos laid off many members of its forward-thinking teams. Then, closer to launch, another round of cuts significantly impacted QA and user research staff. The remaining teams were stretched thin, simultaneously maintaining the existing S2 app while building its replacement. The combination of a growing backlog from years prior and diminished testing resources created a perfect storm.

Feeding Wall Street

A data-driven slide showing Sonos’ customer base growth and revenue opportunities. It highlights increasing product registrations, growth in multi-product households, and a potential >$6 billion revenue opportunity by converting single-product households to multi-product ones.

Measurement myopia can lead to unintended consequences. When Sonos became public in 2018, three metrics the company reported to Wall Street were products registered, Sonos households, and products per household. Requiring customers to register their products is easy enough for a stationary WiFi-connected speaker. But it’s a different issue when it’s a portable one like the Sonos Roam when it’ll be used primarily as a Bluetooth speaker. When my daughter moved into the dorms at UCLA two years ago, I bought her a Roam. But because of Sonos’ quarterly financial reporting and the necessity to tabulate product registrations and new households, her Bluetooth speaker was a paperweight until she came home for Christmas. The speaker required WiFi connectivity and account creation for initial setup, but the university’s network security prevented the required initial WiFi connection.

The Content Distraction

A promotional image for Sonos Radio, featuring bold white text over a red, semi-transparent square with a bubbly texture. The background shows a tattooed woman wearing a translucent green top, holding a patterned ceramic mug. Below the main text, a caption reads “Now Playing – Indie Gold”, with a play button icon beneath it. The Sonos logo is positioned vertically on the right side.

Perhaps the most egregious example of misplaced priorities, driven by the need to show revenue growth, was Sonos’ investment into content features. Sonos Radio launched in April 2020 as a complimentary service for owners. An HD, ad-free paid tier launched later in the same year. Clearly, the thirst to generate another revenue stream, especially a monthly recurring one, was the impetus behind Sonos Radio. Customers thought of Sonos as a hardware company, not a content one.

At the time of the Sonos Radio HD launch, “Beagle” a user in Sonos’ community forums, wrote (emphasis mine):

I predicted a subscription service in a post a few months back. I think it’s the inevitable outcome of floating the company - they now have to demonstrate ways of increasing revenue streams for their shareholders. In the U.K the U.S ads from the free version seem bizarre and irrelevant.

If Sonos wish to commoditise streaming music that’s their business but I see nothing new or even as good as other available services. What really concerns me is if Sonos were to start “encouraging” (forcing) users to access their streams by removing Tunein etc from the app. I’m not trying to demonise Sonos, heaven knows I own enough of their products but I have a healthy scepticism when companies join an already crowded marketplace with less than stellar offerings. Currently I have a choice between Sonos Radio and Tunein versions of all the stations I wish to use. I’ve tried both and am now going to switch everything to Tunein. Should Sonos choose to “encourage” me to use their service that would be the end of my use of their products. That may sound dramatic and hopefully will prove unnecessary but corporate arm twisting is not for me.

My sources said the company started growing its content team, reflecting the belief that Sonos would become users’ primary way to discover and consume music. However, this strategy ignored a fundamental reality: Sonos would never be able to do Spotify better than Spotify or Apple Music better than Apple.

This split focus had real consequences. As the content team expanded, the small controls team struggled with a significant backlog of UX and tech debt, often diverted to other mandatory projects. For example, one employee mentioned that a common user fear was playing music in the wrong room. I can imagine the grief I’d get from my wife if I accidentally played my emo Death Cab For Cutie while she was listening to her Eckhart Tolle podcast in the other room. Dozens, if not hundreds of paper cuts like this remained unaddressed as resources went to building content discovery features that many users would never use. It’s evident that when buying a speaker, as a user, you want to be able to control it to play your music. It’s much less evident that you want to replace your Spotify with Sonos Radio.

But while old time customers like Beagle didn’t appreciate the addition of Sonos content, it’s not conclusive that it was a complete waste of time and effort. The last mention of Sonos Radio performance was in the Q4 2022 earnings call:

Sonos Radio has become the #1 most listened to service on Sonos, and accounted for nearly 30% of all listening.

The company has said it will break out the revenue from Sonos Radio when it becomes material. It has yet to do so in the four years since its release.

The Release Decision

Four screenshots of the Sonos app interface on a mobile device, displaying music playback, browsing, and system controls. The first screen shows the home screen with recently played albums, music services, and a playback bar. The second screen presents a search interface with Apple Music and Spotify options. The third screen displays the now-playing view with album art and playback controls. The fourth screen shows multi-room speaker controls with volume levels and playback status for different rooms.

As the launch date approached, concerns about readiness grew. According to my sources, experienced engineers and designers warned that the app wasn’t ready. Basic features were missing or unstable. The new cloud-based architecture was causing latency issues. But with the Ace launch looming and business pressures mounting, these warnings fell on deaf ears.

The aftermath was swift and severe. Like countless other users, I found myself struggling with an app that had suddenly become frustratingly sluggish. Basic features that had worked reliably for years became unpredictable. Speaker groups would randomly disconnect. Simple actions like adjusting volume now had noticeable delays. The UX was confusing. The elegant simplicity that had made Sonos special was gone.

Making matters worse, the company couldn’t simply roll back to the previous version. The new app’s architecture was fundamentally incompatible with the old one, and the cloud services had been updated to support the new system. Sonos was stuck trying to fix issues on the fly while customers grew increasingly frustrated.

Looking Forward

Since the PR disaster, the company has steadily improved the app. It even published a public Trello board to keep customers apprised of its progress, though progress seemed to stall at some point, and it has since been retired.

A Trello board titled “Sonos App Improvement & Bug Tracker” displaying various columns with updates on issues, roadmap items, upcoming features, recent fixes, and implemented solutions. Categories include system issues, volume responsiveness, music library performance, and accessibility improvements for the Sonos app.

Tom Conrad, cofounder of Pandora and a director on Sonos’s board, became the company’s interim CEO after Patrick Spence was discharged. Conrad addressed these issues head-on in his first letter to employees:

I think we’ll all agree that this year we’ve let far too many people down. As we’ve seen, getting some important things right (Arc Ultra and Ace are remarkable products!) is just not enough when our customers’ alarms don’t go off, their kids can’t hear their playlist during breakfast, their surrounds don’t fire, or they can’t pause the music in time to answer the buzzing doorbell.

Conrad signals that the company has already begun shifting resources back to core functionality, promising to “get back to the innovation that is at the heart of Sonos’s incredible history.” But rebuilding trust with customers will take time.

Since Conrad’s takeover, more top brass from Sonos left the company, including the chief product officer, the chief commercial officer, and the chief marketing officer.

Lessons for Product Teams

I admit that my original hypothesis in writing this piece was that B2C tech companies are less customer-oriented in their product management decisions than B2B firms. I think about the likes of Meta making product decisions to juice engagement. But in more conversations with PM friends and lurking in r/ProductManagement, that hypothesis is debunked. Sonos just ended making a bunch of poor decisions.

One designer noted that what happened at Sonos isn’t necessarily unique. Incentives, organizational structures, and inertia can all color decision-making at any company. As designers, product managers, and members of product teams, what can we learn from Sonos’s series of unfortunate events?

  1. Don’t let tech debt get out of control. Companies should not let technical debt accumulate until a complete rewrite becomes necessary. Instead, they need processes to modernize their code constantly.
  2. Protect core functionality. Maintaining core functionality must be prioritized over new features when modernizing platforms. After all, users care more about reliability than new fancy new capabilities. You simply can’t mess up what’s already working.
  3. Organizational memory matters. New leaders must understand and respect institutional knowledge about technology, products, and customers. Quick changes without deep understanding can be dangerous.
  4. Listen to the OG. When experienced team members raise concerns, those warnings deserve serious consideration.
  5. Align incentives with user needs. Organizations need to create systems and incentives that reward user-centric decision making. When the broader system prioritizes other metrics, even well-intentioned teams can drift away from user needs.

As a designer, I’m glad I now understand it wasn’t Design’s fault. In fact, the design team at Sonos tried to warn the powers-that-be about the impending disaster.

As a Sonos customer, I’m hopeful that Sonos will recover. I love their products—when they work. The company faces months of hard work to rebuild customer trust. For the broader tech industry, it is a reminder that even well-resourced companies can stumble when they lose sight of their core value proposition in pursuit of new initiatives.

As one of my sources reflected, the magic of Sonos was always in making complex technology invisible—you just wanted to play music, and it worked. Somewhere along the way, that simple truth got lost in the noise.


P.S. I wanted to acknowledge Michael Tsai’s excellent post on his blog about this fiasco. He’s been constantly updating it with new links from across the web. I read all of those sources when writing this post.