Sonos had a very bad 2024, starting with its app relaunch in March, which immediately annoyed customers with its missing features and poor performance. Sonos spent the rest of the year repairing it, which cost huge amounts of money and would have delayed other products as a result. During all of this, the company launched its first pair of headphones, which weren’t met with much success.
Many Sonos users have turned their anger on CEO Patrick Spence, and it appears the Sonos board agrees: Spence is leaving Sonos immediately, with a former executive from Pandora (the music streaming service) intervening to temporarily replace him, while the search for a long-term CEO continues (via Bloomberg).
Tom Conrad is the name of the man taking over for now, and he says he has a prominent tattoo on his arm of the Sonos Ace headset, among many other tech tattoos, so you could say that he wears his love of the business on his sleeve.
Conrad said in his letter to employees (via The Verge):
“I think we’ll all agree that this year we’ve let way too many people down. As we’ve seen, doing some important things right (Arc Ultra and Ace are outstanding products!) n It’s simply not enough when our customers’ alarms don’t go off, their kids don’t hear their playlist during breakfast, their environment doesn’t go off, or they can’t pause the music in time to respond to the buzz of the doorbell.
“I’m here to get us back on track. But is getting back on track enough?”
“I think the answer is clearly no. Getting back to basics is necessary, but clearly not enough to unlock the future we all envision for Sonos. As thrilled as I will be when every Sonos customer I meet will say to me, “ You work at Sonos!? I love my Sonos!”, what really gets me up in the morning is the idea that we can extend the Sonos platform far beyond “audio out loud to the house”.
“Many of you have shared with me your own frustrations about the drift from our shared ideals. There is an enormous amount of work ahead of us, including what I am sure will be very difficult times , decisions, and compromises, but I’m energized by the passion I see all around me to do right by our customers and return to the innovation that is at the heart of Sonos’ incredible story.
The letter above appears to obliquely reference several of the issues that landed Sonos in such a dire situation, such as restructurings that changed the way product development was focused and ignoring growing technical debt, which which means the problems could escalate to the point of disaster – you can read much more about Sonos’ slow decline internally here.
Which suggests that the new CEO understands the fundamental issues and recognizes how internal issues lead to problems for the people who buy the products. In particular, the way Conrad raises the idea that people should react positively to the idea of someone working for Sonos suggests that he really paid attention to the seriousness of the damage to the company’s reputation .
Word of mouth used to be some of the best in the tech world, but if you watch a Sonos-related video on TechRadar’s TikTok account now, you’ll see a sea of comments saying to never buy anything from the company in due to the new app (which, to be honest, has improved significantly since its launch).
So it’s good news that the problems appear to have been identified by the interim CEO. The big question is whether he will have the ability to change them during his tenure and whether the permanent CEO shares his views – or even if everything goes well in the long run, whether Sonos will ever regain its prestige in the same domain. path.
