Sonos CEO Patrick Spence has been replaced in his role and is leaving the company. Its interim CEO says this is because the company “let far too many people down.”
Customers have been calling for Spence to be sacked ever since the disastrous launch of a new app left many of them struggling with connectivity problems and broken features …
The Sonos mess at-a-glance
In May of last year, Sonos launched the company’s first headphones, the Ace, intended to compete with AirPods Max. The app needed to be updated to support these, and the company decided to use it as an opportunity for a ground-up rebuild, launching a completely new app just ahead of the launch.
That did not go well. Customers were upset at the company removing much-loved features, and many owners of older Sonos speakers experienced connection problems and lag. Given that the whole idea of Sonos is an Apple-esque It Just Works, customers were understandably angry at the company – even more so when it turned out to break accessibility too.
Sonos initially downplayed the complaints, but CEO Patrick Spence subsequently emailed customers to apologize, and provide a timeline for fixes, subsequently making seven promises.
However, customers weren’t impressed, and called for Spence to be fired.
Former Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is out
Bloomberg reports that customers have now gotten their wish.
Sonos Chief Executive Officer Patrick Spence is leaving after eight years in the job, a move that follows a botched app revamp that upset customers and stymied growth.
The audio technology company named Tom Conrad, a board member and former executive at Snap Inc. and the Pandora music streaming service, as interim CEO.
Companies sometimes create fictions intended to disguise what really went on, with the likes of handover periods and role adjustments, but there was no such attempt here. Spence left immediately, and Conrad made no bones about the reason for this.
“When it doesn’t work, our customers are taken out of the moment and are right to feel that we’ve let them down,” Conrad said about the Sonos user experience in an email to employees. “I think we’ll all agree that this year we’ve let far too many people down.”
Conrad was one of the creators of the Pandora music service, and a former VP at Snap. More recently, he was in charge of product at the ill-fated streaming video app Quibi. The search is on for a permanent replacement.
Sonos previously let around 100 employees go as it saw its stock price fall 13% since the launch of the new app.
Photo by Jako Janse van Rensburg on Unsplash
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