Tag: Tom Conrad

I have to imagine Tom Conrad has been very busy since being appointed first interim, and then permanent CEO of Sonos, earlier this year. The company was in a bit of a self-inflicted crisis after it rolled out a new app that removed a number of the features customers cared about, and provided an inferior experience overall.

And yet, one of the things Conrad seems to find time for on a regular basis is replying to angry customers on Threads.

For example, a Sonos customer posted a blistering, painfully familiar rant about the company’s app—calling it “the worst piece of shit software I have ever used.” In his reply, Conrad didn’t make up an excuse or give some corporate version of an apology. He replied like someone who understands exactly how much damage bad software can do to a beloved product.

“We’ve made some material progress but there’s lots of work left to do,” he wrote. “It sounds like we’re doing a particularly bad job in your home and I’d love to learn more.”

If you’ve ever used Sonos, you know this customer’s frustration isn’t new. For years, the company has made some of the best speakers you could buy. The killer feature was that Sonos speakers work together in a way very few competitors have ever matched. And yet the software experience has increasingly felt like the opposite of what the hardware promises.

That’s the tension at the heart of this exchange, and the reason it’s worth writing about. People don’t get this angry over something they don’t care about. The original post isn’t just an angry customer venting; it’s a reminder that the gap between what Sonos promises and what customers experience has grown wide enough for even loyal users to wonder whether the whole system is worth the trouble.

Most companies handle this sort of thing exactly the wrong way. They hide behind statements drafted by PR teams or send customers into endless support loops. They treat anger as a threat instead of what it actually is: an early warning sign that you have a very big problem. By the time people stop complaining, it usually means they’ve already stopped caring—and probably stopped using your product.

That’s why this moment matters. Conrad could’ve ignored the post—or farmed it off to a social media intern—and no one would’ve been surprised. But he didn’t, and that tells you something about the kind of problem Sonos knows it has to solve.

The company’s app redesign earlier this year was supposed to be a step toward a more modern platform—faster, cleaner, more flexible. Instead, it felt to customers like a regression. Features disappeared, and people who had invested hundreds or thousands of dollars into their sound system suddenly found themselves wrestling with something that used to “just work.”

In his reply, Conrad gets right to the heart saying that he is in his role “in large part to fix the app.” He knows what’s broken, and he knows that nothing else Sonos does will matter if he doesn’t get this right.

The lesson here is actually quite simple: When your product breaks the relationship you’ve built with your customers, you can’t delegate the job of repairing what went wrong. You can’t outsource rebuilding your brand’s credibility. As the CEO, you own it.

By the way, this kind of engagement scales better than you might think. Not because a CEO can personally fix everyone’s problem, but because public replies send a signal—to customers, employees, and investors—that someone at the top is listening. It communicates that Conrad knows that improving the experience isn’t a side project.

The company spent nearly two decades building a brand around effortless, elegant home audio. It can’t afford to let its app become a symbol of everything that frustrates people about modern tech. The longer that perception calcifies, the harder it becomes to change it.

So when Sonos’s CEO shows up on Threads, it’s not a stunt. It isn’t even about the individual customer he’s responding to. Just follow the thread of replies and you’ll see him inviting countless more customers to send him a DM about their problems and complaints.

Really, Conrad’s reply is about the thousands of other customers who might read the thread, and the millions of users who rely on Sonos every day. It’s a public acknowledgment that the company knows exactly where it fell short—and is willing to own the work ahead.

That’s something every leader should pay attention to. Customers don’t expect perfection. But they do expect honesty and accountability. And when something goes wrong, they expect the people in charge to show up with more than excuses.