Sonos Lays Off 200 Employees After App Failure
Sonos is laying off 200 employees in an effort to streamline its product teams, reports Bloomberg. The layoffs come as Sonos continues to recover from a failed app redesign last May that alienated longtime customers.
Following widespread criticism over the app's buggy interface and missing features, Sonos temporarily suspended development on hardware products and focused all of its effort on app improvements. It took months for the company to add functionality that had been removed with the revamp, and revenue declined 16 percent in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2024.
Then Sonos CEO Patrick Spence penned an apology and outlined the steps Sonos was taking to fix the app in July, but he ultimately stepped down earlier this year. Spence was replaced with interim CEO Tom Conrad, who founded music service Pandora and has been a longtime Sonos board member.
Conrad told employees that Sonos has been "mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be," which is why the company is restructuring. Going forward, Sonos will have a simpler organization with groups for hardware, software, design, quality, and operations, rather than separate groups for different product categories.
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