I think it’s really hard in any environment where customers are disappointed when they are customer-centric. If anything, Sonos is customer-centric. It’s double when you work, and you don’t understand the relative priority of contributions. And, we do put the ladder as much as the previous one, and people understand how their work fits in the success of today’s Sonos, which really resets the cultural tone.
There have been all these updates and changes in the year since the app was launched. Did the whole experience teach you anything else about the user the moment you’ve been there?
I think part of the reason why getting me up every morning to do this pretty hard work is because Sonos has a very special place in the life of his clients. I mean, of course we were the soundtrack for the barbecue and dinner. But it is not an exaggeration to say that we are born literally and die. I mean, frankly, conception.
ha!
I mean, you can’t say that about Microsoft Excel.
OK, I guess it depends on your weirdness.
Yes, I think so. It is indeed an honor to be able to engage in the emotional structure of people’s lives, but when we fail, it has an emotional impact.
A few weeks ago, I was talking to clients on social media. There was something wrong with his system, and it was the day his parents held their 50th anniversary celebration. All he wants is party music. In your experience, you may one day browse the Instagram experience, and when you can’t get a once-in-a-lifetime celebration, it has a different emotional wall.
If anything, the experience of interacting with customers over the past 100 days is just that what we do is more than just software. This is the emotional music of people’s lives. It only needs to work every time.
I’m curious about the software hardware divide. Sonos is a fundamental hardware product. How does your software Mojo help companies that live or die?
I mean, it was so nice to work with our acoustics team, industrial design team and hardware team. They are just the best things in the world, and it’s the core part of Sonos’s obvious identity. But Sonos is also a platform. Each of our products has key desktop software sizes – power management of portable devices, noise cancellation of headphones, 3D positioning of immersive audio.
If I’m going to criticize these years, I think maybe we haven’t made the right level of investment in the Sonos platform software. In a sense, the attempt to rebuild the mobile experience is a remedy for this. But as we described, we made some mistakes along the way. So, part of the reason I can be confident about the progress made is that we have a very strong quantitative understanding of the performance of today’s software platforms relative to previous generations of software. Among dozens of metrics, the platform performs better than the replaced software.
