Sonos has had a few tumultuous months, all of which date back to what was now clearly a hurried application design that led to a terrible experience for many clients and a long and messy process of repair of those relationships. The long-awaited launch of the Ace Over-Ear headphones went up, although the impressive specifications of Arc Ultra Soundbar launched more recently shone.
More recently, CEO Patrick Spence left, and a new leadership was introduced. Earlier this week, it was announced that Sonos would further reduce their general personnel, dismissing 200 employees. Even so, the new interim CEO Tom Conrad is throwing a little more light on internal changes, and much can be read in a way that returns to the form.
While Conrad quickly repeats that there is much more work to do, he is almost looking back in good sense. “I am returning to Sonos to a more Chamadre and more focused company,” said Conrad, who focuses on changing the way Sonos operates. “I have reorganized our product and engineering staff in functional teams for hardware, software, design, quality and operations and far from dedicated business units dedicated to individual products categories. This allows us to gather cross functional projects that maximize our efficiency as we evaluate, prioritize and focus on the highest value market opportunities, “Conrad explained.
It is a re-do in a previous structure that clearly did not work fluently, especially with the people who mostly worked in individual parts of the business. Possibly only the application or perhaps even more segments, which did not join to improve the entire Sonos ecosystem. It was probably a failure, and we saw that some of the possible results came to fruition, but Conrad and the teams that left in Sonos have now reorganized to better see the brand as a whole.
For example, the application is probable that it is no longer isolated, with a team focused solely on it; Rather, it could be more integrated throughout the alignment. How can the application work better with the ARC Ultra while improving interoperability with future products or creates a new flow to help you regroup existing and connected products when new ones are introduced?
Conrad described that the Sonos configuration was in layers with dismissals, which probably made it difficult to work in all departments and, therefore, in the product lines. Similarly, with an approach to “improve Sonos’ experience to a place that exceeds the expectations of all our clients”, it is ensuring that the company is operating in a way to achieve this, or at least establish it with that hope.
Along the same lines, Conrad also declared that even with almost constant application updates and other changes, “our central experience still needs significant improvement.” And that should certainly bring some hope to the customers of Sonos, the long data and the futures. That a disaster at the application level does not happen again.
As for what could be next, our Home Entertainment Manager, Matthew Bolton, gave his expert analysis about the rumored transmission box.
And you can see the complete transcript of Sonos Quarter’s profits call, one of 2025, here.
