‘We let them down’: Sonos gets a new CEO after a disastrous year and it looks like better times are ahead
Sonos had a very bad 2024, starting with the app’s relaunch in March, which immediately outraged customers due to its missing features and slow performance. Sonos spent the rest of the year fixing it, costing huge amounts of money and reportedly delaying other products as a result. During all this, the company launched its first headphones, which were not a big hit.
Many Sonos users focused their ire on CEO Patrick Spence, and it appears the Sonos board agreed: Spence is leaving Sonos immediately, with a former executive from Pandora (the music streaming service) stepping in 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 the time being, and he says he has a prominent arm tattoo of the Sonos Ace headphones, among many other tech tattoos, so we could say he wears his love for the company on his sleeve wears.
Conrad said in his letter to employees (via The edge):
“I think we’ll all agree that we’ve let far too many people down this year. As we’ve seen, it’s not enough to get some important things right (Arc Ultra and Ace are remarkable products!) when our customers’ alarms don’t go off, their kids can’t hear their playlist during breakfast, their surrounds don’t work, 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 it enough to get back on track?’
“I think the answer is clearly no. Going back to basics is necessary, but clearly not enough to unlock the future we all envision for Sonos. I will be so happy if every Sonos customer I meet tells me says: ‘You work at Sonos!? I love my Sonos!’, what really keeps me awake in the morning is the idea that we can expand the Sonos platform much further than ‘out loud audio at home’.
“I’ve heard from many of you about your own frustrations about how far we’ve strayed from our shared ideals. There is a huge amount of work ahead of us, including, I am sure, some very challenging moments, decisions and compromises, but I am energized by the passion I see all around me to do what is right for our customers and back returning to the innovation at the heart of Sonos’ incredible history.”
The letter above seems to obliquely reference some of the problems that led Sonos to such a terrible place, such as restructuring that changed the focus on product development, and ignoring its growing technical debt, meaning that problems could worsen until they became disastrous – you can read much more about the slow decline of Sonos internally here.
This suggests that the new CEO understands the fundamental issues, but also recognizes how problems internally lead to problems for the people who buy the products. In particular, the way Conrad puts forward the idea that people should respond positively to the idea of someone working for Sonos suggests that he has really paid attention to how badly the company’s reputation has been damaged.
It used to have the best word of mouth in the tech world, but now if you watch a Sonos related video on TikTok from Ny Breaking account, you’ll see a sea of comments saying you should never buy anything from the company because of the new app (which, to be fair, has improved tremendously 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 will have the ability to change them in his time there, and whether the longtime CEO shares his views – and even if all goes well in the long run, whether Sonos will ever regain its prestige in the same period . way.