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30 posts tagged with “product management”

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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Nate Jones performed a yeoman’s job of summarizing Mary Meeker’s 340-slide deck on AI trends, the “2025 Technology as Innovation (TAI) Report.” For those of you who don’t know, Mary Meeker is a famed technology analyst and investor known for her insightful reports on tech industry trends. For the longest time, as an analyst at Kleiner Perkins, she published the Internet Trends report. And she was always prescient.

Half of Jones’ post is the summary, while the other half is how the report applies to product teams. The whole thing is worth 27 minutes of your time, especially if you work in software.

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I Summarized Mary Meeker’s Incredible 340 Page 2025 AI Trends Deck—Here’s Mary’s Take, My Response, and What You Can Learn

Yes, it’s really 340 pages, and yes I really compressed it down, called out key takeaways, and shared what you can actually learn about building in the AI space based on 2025 macro trends!

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4 min read
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.

16 min read
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.