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Sonos had a very bad 2024, starting with the relaunch of its app in March, which instantly riled up customers with its missing features and sluggish performance. Sonos spent the rest of the year fixing it, costing vast sums of money and reportedly delaying other products as a result. During all this, the company launched its first pair of headphones, which were not a big hit.
A lot of Sonos users turned their ire towards CEO Patrick Spence, and it seems that Sonos board agreed – Spence is leaving Sonos immediately, with a former Pandora (the music-streaming service) exec stepping in to replace him on a temporary basis, 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 arm tattoo of the Sonos Ace headphones, among many other tech tattoos, so we might say that he wears his love of the company 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 far too many people down. As we’ve seen, getting some important things right (Arc Ultra and Ace are remarkable products!) is just not enough when our customers’ alarms don’t go off, their kids can’t hear their playlist during breakfast, their surrounds don’t fire, or they can’t pause the music in time to answer the buzzing 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. So as delighted as I’ll be when every Sonos customer I meet tells me “You work at Sonos!? I love my Sonos!”, what really gets me up in the morning is the idea that we can expand the Sonos platform well beyond “out loud audio at home.”
“I’ve heard from many of you about your own frustrations about how far we’ve drifted from our shared ideals. There’s a tremendous amount of work in front of us, including what I’m sure will be some very challenging moments, decisions, and trade-offs, but I’m energized by the passion I see all around me for doing right by our customers and getting back to the innovation that is at the heart of Sonos’ incredible history.”
The letter above appears to reference obliquely several of the issues that led Sonos to such a terrible place, such as restructures that changed how product development was focused, and ignoring growing technical debt, meaning that problems could compound until they became disastrous – you can read far more about Sonos’ slow decline internally here.
Which suggests that the new CEO understands the fundamental issues, as well as acknowledging how problems internally lead to problems for the people who buy the products. In particular, the way Conrad raises the idea that people should respond positively to the idea that someone works for Sonos suggests that he’s really paid attention to just how severely the company’s reputation has been damaged.
It used to have some of the best word-of-mouth in the world of tech, but if you look now at any Sonos-related video on TechRadar’s TikTok account, you’ll see a sea of comments saying to never buy anything from the company due to the new app (which has, to be fair, improved massively since launch).
So it’s good news that the problems appear to have been identified by the interim CEO. The big question is whether he’ll have the ability to change them in his time there, and whether the permanent CEO shares his views – or even if all things go right long-term, whether Sonos will ever get its prestige back in the same way.
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