It is really difficult, I think, to be in any environment where you dropped your customers when you focus on the customer. And if anything, Sonos is centered on the customer. It is doubly difficult when you work and you do not understand the relative priority of your contribution. And we have really reset this scale as much as the old thing, and people understand how their work is part of the success of Sonos today, and it is really reset cultural tone.
During the year which followed the deployment of this application, there were all these updates and these modifications. While you went there, has this experience taught you anything else about your users?
I think that part of what makes me get out of bed every morning to make this fairly difficult work is that Sonos has a really special place in the life of our client. I mean, of course we are the soundtrack of barbecues and dinners. But it is not an exaggeration to say that we are literally there for birth, for death. I mean, let’s be honest, for design.
Ha!
I mean, you can’t say that about Microsoft Excel.
Well, it depends on how you are weird, I suppose.
Yeah, I guess yes. It is really an honor to go to work on something that is so webbed in the emotional fabric of people’s life, but the consequence is that when we fail, it has an emotional impact.
I spoke to a client on social networks a few weeks ago. He had problems with his system, and it was the day of the celebration of his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. All he wanted was music for the party. Where you could be tolerant of a hiccup in your experience by scrolling Instagram one day, it has a different emotional wall when you cannot have music for a kind of unique celebration.
If anything, the experience of interacting with our customers in the last 100 days is just this recall of what we do goes beyond the software. It is an emotional soundtrack for people’s lives. It just needs to work every time.
I am curious to know the software division. Sonos is a fundamentally material product. How does your Mojo software help a company that lives or dies on the hardware?
I mean, it is such a pleasure to work with our acoustic team and the industrial design team and the material teams largely. They are just the best in the world in this kind of thing, and it is such a central part of the obvious identity of Sonos. But Sonos is also a platform. There are dimensions of critical table software at each of our products: power management for laptops, noise cancellation for headphones, 3D positioning for immersive audio.
If I had to criticize these years, I think we may not have made the right level of investment in the Sonos platform software. And in a way, the attempt to receive the mobile experience was supposed to be a cure for this. But as we described, we made mistakes along the way. And therefore a part of the reason why I can speak with a certain confidence of the progress we have made is that we have a very strong quantitative understanding of how the software platform works today compared to previous generation software. In dozens of measurements, the platform works better than the software it has replaced.
