A Q&A with Design Storytelling Expert Tad Toulis
Spotlight articles shine a light on designers we admire, asking leaders in the field about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with VP of design at Sonos and veteran storyteller Tad Toulis. With a career spanning over two decades at the intersection of design, strategy, and innovation, Toulis has built a reputation as a leader who shapes design teams and creative cultures within some of the most influential consumer electronics companies.
As Vice President of Design at Sonos, Toulis has spent over a decade evolving the brand’s in-house design practice, expanding its influence across industrial design, user experience, and strategic partnerships. Toulis has also held key design leadership roles at Teague, Samsung, Motorola, and Lunar Design. His early work as a Fulbright Scholar underscores his deep curiosity about materials and manufacturing—a theme that has informed his approach to product innovation ever since. We asked him about the key elements of a compelling product story, fostering a culture of storytelling, and the influence of AI on design storytelling.
Q:
What are some key elements of a compelling product story?
A:
Whether it’s movies, books, or any medium, there’s a question of how simple the story is, how easy to comprehend. It doesn’t mean that everything has to be simplistic, but when you’re talking to users or even talking across your own organization, there’s a lot of benefit to simplicity and clarity. Anything that gets too complicated or too nuanced can get lost working across groups of people and can get lost in the transmission in the marketplace to the consumer.
You’ve probably heard the phrase—it’s very common in consumer electronics—don’t ship the org, which is essentially shorthand for, Don’t let the structure of your organization and the ways that may negatively impact internal communication and collaboration evidence in your product. But it can happen. Brand marketing can be very strong on certain pillars, and then you have to ask, Is the product actually living up to the marketing?
At one point at Sonos I had a very close collaboration with our chief brand officer, and we shared the same story. She was really really focused on product being the origin point of the story and I was pretty savvy about understanding how product can tell story. It was a really good collaboration for a couple of years but then she left and then I saw the story slip into, We sell speakers. It became flatter, there wasn’t a bigger story than selling speakers. She came from a background of culture marketing and culture brand building and had done tours at Patagonia, so she took on this task that she called, You’re better than this. It was meant to help people understand how their listening had deteriorated in a world of digital abundance. For example: your phone in a cup as an amplifier. It’ll work, but you can probably get better sound. Another example is that one of the technologies that Sonos competes against is Bluetooth, which is very easy to use. That ease is very powerful but, because of the way Bluetooth works, when you get an inbound call, the music gets disrupted. When you get a text message, the music gets disrupted. So the way she synthesized that was with a bigger story of: You, as a user, are better than this. You deserve more out of your music listening than this space of constant tradeoffs.
Her point was that there’s a more powerful story here than selling speakers. It’s the understanding that music is invigorating. One can say it’s part of the life force that we all share, and so her point was, You may not realize it but you have, by degrees, ended up in a very marginalized experience by leveraging this technology, Bluetooth, which our product competes with by using Wi-Fi, which can give you a more robust audio experience because it’s not impacted by inbound calls and text messages and things of that nature.
Q:
How do you balance functional design with emotional storytelling?
A:
You need both. If it’s too much story and not enough function, that’s no good. If it’s too much function and not enough story, that can also not be good. I mean, to be fair, there are some products that operate in a fairly straightforward space where they’re very functional products and they probably don’t need very complex stories. I think the thing is, working in the spaces I’ve worked in with interaction design, user research, packaging, this is a multifaceted process and to coordinate all those pieces you need good stories.
An example of a story I can give you that rode right through that intersection was one of the first things I took on at Sonos. We had what we called the signature detail. This was when we first introduced touch control onto our devices. Because the nature of our product was multi-orientational, all of the activity on the product was happening in the same place: dead center. That’s also where the tweeter wants to be on our speaker. Tweeters are extremely touchy, they don’t like anything in their way. We wanted to put the brand there because we were putting these touch controls there, and we were using the brand mark as a way to identify where to touch. This created a collision course between what design wanted to achieve, what brand wanted to achieve, and what audio wanted to achieve. The way we moved through that story was to actually reference the Sonos word mark, which is a palindrome, and say, Look, you can read it front to back and you can read back to front. It’s a great distillation of the flexibility of the system, which allows you to orient it however you want.
I created a small movie that I made in Keynote and pushed out to the organization to help them understand that the intent here was not to hurt sound. The intent was to demonstrate flexibility. The key visual we used was the Lego system: very simple elements that are recombinable in any number of ways. I’ve found, over the course of my career, that things like that—campaigning, holding open houses, using user research—are ways to engage the company in a conversation. You have some core stories that you’re constantly returning to and adding depth to. Our story was, Simple things constructed in unexpected ways that behave in ways you’ve never experienced. Each of those pieces was built by a bet. Simple things was about manufacturing structure. How we make them simple things. Constructed in unexpected ways was a bet on tooling and investment in machining. That behave in ways you’ve never experienced was about user experience. All of those pieces became the baseline for what we did in design. Internal campaigning, open houses, and videos are extremely valuable tools for getting people to participate in the story that you’re building.
Q:
How do you foster a culture of storytelling within a cross-functional design team?
A:
The interesting thing with cross-functional teams is that they’re kind of, in miniature, the same as the organization. You have these cross-functional tribes, and you need all of them to be coordinated to deliver the product. So, in my time at Sonos, I held an offsite around this theme. Just because we’re all designers doesn’t mean we’re all working the same way. It’s design, but design has multiple languages that are participating, especially in a cross-functional team. When I came to Sonos, user research was really beta testing. You would build a product, you would get it into the hands of users, and you would test it. But we weren’t as sure-footed in qualitative user research. One of the things I really pushed was bringing qualitative user research into the design organization and making sure that the people we hired in those roles were good storytellers. Because if the research isn’t accessed, it isn’t going to fuel the product, it isn’t going to help make good decisions. We needed to find user researchers who were comfortable with storytelling. The other thing we did is hold internal design reviews and cross-functional staff meetings, and the center pole of many of those sessions was a case study. We would ask members of the team to prepare a story to share at the staff meeting to stress test their skill set in storytelling, so they were doing it in a safe environment with friendlies before we took it out to the org.
Q:
How has your approach to leading design teams evolved throughout your career?
A:
When you start, you think you’re being promoted to a leadership position because you have something. Maybe you do. But that can also reinforce bad behaviors, and I would say the first several years, when I found myself leading people, I was responding to some pretty bad managers I had had. What is the antithesis of what I observed? How would I not create that environment? Over time it was more about control. You think, I know how to do it. They’re giving me this responsibility because I know how to get things done. But as you spend more and more time managing wider and wider groups of people, especially from outside your discipline, you have to develop other strategies and a much deeper toolkit. For me, the toolkit became more about meeting people where they are. Everyone I have to manage, I have to learn how they operate, because they receive information differently and so forth. So as I’ve worked on broader problems, more complex problems with skill sets I don’t possess, what I’ve learned is to meet people where they are.
Really great leadership and management is about small adjustments. You give the team a common story to work against so they can have ownership and can be invested in what you’re trying to achieve. Whenever you have to do a big intervention, probably something has gone wrong. And sometimes you do have to do a big intervention. Really great management across cross-functional teams meet people where they are and understand how to talk many languages to many people, but do that in a way that’s coherent enough that it still adds up to something bigger. It can’t be a different story for each person that doesn’t seem to go to a common destination. You try to get to a place where your management is small interventions, light tweaks, taps. Then people show up with more enthusiasm and energy because they’re invested and not feeling micromanaged or heavily managed because people don’t really do great work in that environment.
Q:
What role does storytelling play in shaping how users interact with and perceive a product?
A:
In cases where it’s used effectively, I think it can have a huge impact on how users approach the product. My background has predominantly been in consumer electronics, and I’ve been in that industry for quite a long time. I think story can go a long way to helping consumers approach products but—I will be honest with you—more and more I see a handful of dominant stories that aren’t very imaginative, like convenience and innovation. I think stories can do a lot to help users orient around the product as long as they reflect what has actually been pursued in the product development process. If they don’t, it doesn’t necessarily manifest clearly in the product. I think it’s really dependent on the category you’re working in and how faithfully you’ve stuck to a coherent story.
Marketing has a role to play but there are some very dominant stories, at least in my sector, and I think they aren’t actively managed anymore. They’re just used as shorthand to get people to get excited about the product. They’re not actually meaningful stories.
Q:
How have consumer expectations around design and product storytelling changed over the years?
A:
Speaking from the consumer electronic space, which is a very particular field, there was a period of time when it was going really well. Now I feel like we’ve fallen into this trap of innovation, intelligence, and convenience. These are very big stories that are constantly reinforced, and I think most of them are in the service of convenience, which I don’t think is intrinsically a good thing. I think it can lead to a very passive user experience. Storytelling is still there but I feel like there are a couple of dominant stories in my industry that keep getting attention and therefore are at risk of crowding out other stories and other voices that want to bring something else to the table. The momentum of a couple of big players in consumer electronics really dominate the story, and they dominate these narratives of convenience, intelligence, innovation.
I’ve bounced between agency life and in-house life, and the best period of my in-house life is when the teams are smaller, when you’re in more of a startup mode and the team is small. When I look outside, one of the things I see is that there are a lot of organizations that do really powerful work because their scale is such that it’s easy to communicate up and down the communication chain. In the case of startups, everybody joins for the mission. They’ve already self-identified as interested in that thing. A great company I always look at is Teenage Engineering, they do niche audio products. They are a certain scale that allows them to have a lot of control, and everyone in that group is very dedicated to what they’re putting out there in the world.
As a company scales, and you get larger and larger, you bring in career professionals from other places who bring their ways of operating to the table. The challenge is that they may not be responding to what the company’s actually about. So you get, This is how we do it at company A. This is how we do it at company B. Unless you’re really paying attention, your company ends up being a compendium of these different operating styles. And it goes back to the story. They don’t all have the same story, where they can say, This is our common story. This is how we pursue things. This is what we’re in the service of. Unless you’re really mindful and grooming things, then inevitably you’re going to get a lot of noise in the system, and that noise will dull the efficacy of the story and the clarity of what you’re putting out there. Whether it’s the product itself, the marketing that supports it, or the way the brand is supporting it, those things start to get murky when you’re not paying attention to how consistently people are drawing from the same common story.
Q:
What role does sustainability play in the way brands tell stories through design?
A:
There’s been a lot of good advancement in sustainability. The challenge with sustainability in my sector is that consumer electronics are a pretty synthetic world. It’s funny because when I started at Sonos, people ask, Should we make an enclosure out of this organic material? And the answer is that you can but, by the time it’s shippable, you’ve done so many treatments to it that it’s no longer truly organic material. We’ve all heard the term greenwashing, right? Going back to consumers, a story that’s been really popular is trying to appeal to people’s values by how you position the product, and sustainability is certainly one of those stories. Some companies practice it very, very well, and some companies practice it nominally. The most impact will come from regulation. A supply chain is such a complicated animal. There are so many twists and turns, and by the time a company subcontracts out to another company, their practices may not always be aligned with the subcontractor. Things have definitely improved, I just don’t know if they’re improving at a rate of speed that’s going to have a significant impact on everything we’re seeing come to fruition right now.
Q:
With the rise of smart technology and AI, how do you see product storytelling evolving in the future?
A:
This one worries me a little bit over the near term, because if AI is essentially an ingest of all our stories, then invariably it’s subject to the same tensions of who tells the stories, what are the dominant stories, what are the voices telling those stories? Just like history is written by the victors, right? If you were to ingest 100,000 articles about product development in consumer electronics and you did a word cloud, stories of innovation, intelligence, and convenience would come up far more than others. I think, over the near term, we’re going to get more of that. The stories will trend towards those spaces. The question I am concerned about is, How do more marginalized stories and more marginalized voices get expression? There’s always this tension in whether those stories will make it to the market and make it at scale. I think they can make it to scale right now in smaller activities but I’d love to see those voices operating at the same scale as the dominant stories.
Q:
What advice would you give to designers looking to incorporate storytelling into their work?
A:
My general advice, which I would give to anybody going into design, is to seek out your authentic self and invest in who you are. I feel like there’s always been a subset of great design and a lot of good design. Maybe when I was younger there was a lot of bad design and a subset of good design, but I feel like we’ve gotten to this place where it’s fairly stable. There’s a small percentage of truly great design, there’s a lot of good design, and maybe not as much truly bad design.
Going back to stories, a lot of people are ingesting the same inputs and creating similar things. I always encourage people to know what you’re about, know what your values are, know how you express them in your work, and then get smart about how you articulate them and advocate for them. Talent serves you, to a point, but can you express your ideas? Can you debate with other people? Can you simplify what you’re trying to achieve into a sound bite, so that busy people in an organization can get it? I think the most important thing is for people to own their story, and figure out how to workshop it. The best success comes from really getting in tune with what you bring to the table that’s unique to you, and then becoming very good at deploying that when you’re interacting with others.
Q:
Could you share some books, talks, or resources that have influenced your thinking on design and storytelling?
A:
One book I’ve recommended forever is Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull, who’s one of the key founders of Pixar. The central thesis is that story is everything in their work. Before they commit to building something out, before they make the movie, they really try to get the story right. Story is, to some extent, cheap to develop, but everything is predicated on the story so, if the story doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how much time and money they spend animating and rendering it. They’re maniacally focused on getting the right story in place. I think it’s an important lesson; that you’ve got to get the foundation right because, once you start building on top of it and making decisions—business decisions, investment decisions—it’ll escalate quickly, and it could be escalating on a weak foundation.
Another book that I have also recommended to a lot of people and bought for leadership is Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I used it a lot and have an earmarked, annotated copy. What impressed me about the book was just how important it is to be clear about your basic goal. It encourages you to get to the basics in your thinking: I want to achieve this outcome. What do I need to do to achieve that outcome? What is stuff I’m being asked to do that doesn’t help me achieve that outcome? How can I get that off my plate? It also encourages you to say no to things.When you put these books cheek to jowl, they’re basically asking you to develop a better practice of asking, What’s important to achieving our goal? What is a story that mirrors or reinforces the essence of what we’re trying to achieve and doesn’t distract from it?
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