Just a day after the next potential Sonos project was leaked — a new streaming box — more hard news has hit the company. In a call with employees, followed up by a post on the Sonos site titled “Team Update: Changes to the Way We Operate,” interim CEO Tom Conrad announced a restructuring to the company. The result is layoffs of about 200 people. According to Sonos employment numbers from 2024, this accounts for about 12% of the company.
In the published statement, Conrad repeated what was stated in a company call just before. “One thing I’ve observed first hand is that we’ve become mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be. So across the company today we are reorganizing into flatter, smaller, and more focused teams,” he said. “Most significantly, we are reorganizing our Product organization into functional groups for Hardware, Software, Design, Quality and Operations, and away from dedicated business units devoted to individual product categories.”
The hope with the restructuring is for a more streamlined development and support process. Progress has been a struggle, according to Conrad and what he’s heard from employees, and the change is meant to resolve that. “Being smaller and more focused will require us to do a much better job of prioritizing our work — lately we’ve let too many projects run under a cloud of half-commitment. We’re going to fix this too,” he said in the statement, before moving on to some transition details for those being let go.
It’s no secret the last nine to ten months have been a hard times for Sonos — quite easily the most difficult period for the company. 2024 started off with promise for the company with the launch of the Sonos Ace and a redesign of the app that served as the hub for all Sonos products and streaming. But, as we’ve reported on a few times, the Sonos app update was missing key features and was buggy, alienating a core group of enthusiasts that had long relied on, and applauded, Sonos for its streaming integration.
The loss of team members at a company is always detrimental. But for the sake of the company and its customers, we hope this will be a turning point in the difficulties they’ve all been experiencing, and a return to success for Sonos.
