Sonos’ public Trello board doesn’t delight

At risk of bouncing the rubble even further, we need to talk about where things stand going into September in regards to the state of Sonos. 

For a brief bit of context, Sonos in May updated its app and the underlying system software that controls its family of wireless speakers in preparation for the next generation of products — including the Sonos Ace headphones that arrived just weeks later. That update went poorly, and otherwise working (and not-inexpensive) Sonos systems were left in various stages of disarray. 

It was pretty apparent pretty quickly that something had gone very wrong, though it’s important to remember that everyone’s Sonos setup is going to be different, from the hardware itself, to the music services in use, to the network conditions that tie it all together. (That it ever worked at all as well as it did still seems a little magical.) And we will continue to note that Sonos was relatively quick to acknowledge the issues in the Sonos subreddit. But that’s not the same thing as a public acknowledgement, which didn’t come until about two months later when CEO Patrick Spence issued a public apology just ahead of a further explanation during the company’s earnings call in August. 

All the while, Sonos has been updating its app and its platform and fixing issues every couple weeks. That’s a good thing.

But as I spent the Sunday morning of my Labor Day Weekend sipping coffee and working on the New York Times Sunday Crossword, two things happened. First, I got an email from Sonos warning that it was my last chance to save 20% on hardware that, given the current state of the software, will only serve to frustrate me. And then I remembered that I’d ignored the “news” that Sonos had released a public Trello board so that we can all see what’s being worked on.

While I applaud the transparency, it’s smoke and mirrors. Not everything needs to be done out in the open. Sonos for weeks and months had been keeping folks abreast of the rebuilding road map in the Sonos subreddit, and more officially on its own website. A public Trello board really is superfluous, and perhaps at best a low-key advertisement for Trello. (I’ve used Trello plenty of times. It’s great.) It’s also now one more public-facing place that someone at Sonos has to keep synced with the internal documentation. (Sorry, intern!) 

At this point I don’t really care what Sonos has to say about the fixes. I don’t care about road maps and timelines and Trello boards. I don’t actually expect to be delighted, as Spence said customers one day will be again.

I care about the right speaker group actually activating when I select it. I care about volume controls not taking 10 or 15 seconds to work, if it all. I care about search not sucking.

I care about what Sonos does. I care about it fixing things. Anything else is a distraction.