Tom Conrad
Tom Conrad is the CEO of Zero and on the board of Sonos. He began his career in engineering at Apple, where he helped build key features that remain in iOS today. Tom was previously the VP of Product at Snap and the chief technology officer of Pandora. He also held leadership positions at notable tech flops Pets.com and Quibi, giving him a unique perspective not only on what it takes to build a successful company but also on lessons from failure.
Career Skills
Professional satisfaction is driven more by product passion and team chemistry than by external success metrics or financial returns.
"When I look back on my career and think about the things that I've done, my professional satisfaction is not well correlated with those external metrics and very, very coordinated with do I love the t..."
Engineering Skills
A culture with clear 'swim lanes' that rewards deep functional excellence can be more effective for shipping than a culture of generalist 'gadflies.'
"It was certainly the case that I was welcome to weigh in on the game design or the marketing... but my job was to build the software on time with high quality, period. And if I did those things, I'd b..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Behavioral interviewing grounded in past actions is more effective than asking candidates to speculate on hypothetical problems.
"I tell people that almost every interview question should start with, 'Tell me about a time in your career when...' to give them permission or to set their expectation that I'm asking them to tell me..."
Understanding what naturally energizes a candidate helps identify their 'highest and best use' within the organization.
"I ask almost everybody, 'Imagine that you had a really great day at work. What was it that you did on that day?' Because what I'm trying to figure out is left to their own devices, what do they go to..."
Instinctual reactions to people during the interview process are often accurate indicators of cultural and values alignment.
"Every single time I've taken a job where it turned out that I was working with people who had a different set of values or working styles than I had, I knew. You tell yourself that, at least in my cas..."
Involving the entire team in direct customer support builds radical empathy and a genuine brand voice.
"When we launched the [email protected] was an alias for [email protected]. So if you sent a customer service request to Pandora, every single person in the company received it. And because we made a d..."
Sustainable team cultures prioritize actual output over performative long hours or 'hustle' theater.
"I just wasn't interested in performative contribution, that it's the work that matters and what I want to celebrate is if you can show up and do it and go home and have other things in your life, beca..."
Leadership Skills
Leaders must balance deep detail-orientation with the awareness that their casual suggestions are often interpreted as mandatory directives.
"I see my job as CEO is to try to surf that edge of I'm really in the details... but not overplay my hand with respect to dictating outcomes. The one thing you'll always have as CEO is, no matter how m..."
Product leaders must aggressively challenge unrealistic leadership assumptions with data, especially regarding distribution and market reach.
"Maybe I should have beat the drum a little harder about just how unlikely it was that we were going to land the kind of distribution in month one that the model sort of required. If I had to go back a..."
When working for a visionary founder, the role of a product leader often shifts from defining vision to high-fidelity execution of the founder's direction.
"I take the job full knowing that it's going to be wildly different than Pandora... in the context of Snapchat, at best, I was going to be Evan's right hand, a person that principally executed his visi..."
Strong investor relationships and capital allow for high-conviction, speculative bets that can lead to game-changing product wins.
"One really, really big important lesson that I learned at Snap is about risk taking. And when you have the financial support and the foundational relationship with your investors that Evan has, it rea..."
Product Management Skills
Failing to recognize a fundamental shift in consumer behavior or industry licensing can lead to strategic obsolescence despite early success.
"We had this idea that we're going to reinvent radio... and Spotify and Rdio and Apple Music... they were all going to chase this smaller owned recorded music opportunity... and I think we just got it..."
Temporary design shortcuts often become permanent product legacies that persist through multiple technical rewrites.
"I'm not sure what the point of this story is other than maybe it's something about, I think we all do this as designers and product people. We take these shortcuts that we think that we'll go back lat..."