Sonos CEO Patrick Spence has resigned from the company after eight years on the job, . This follows last year where a redesign lacks core features and breaks down in almost every major way.
The company has tasked Tom Conrad with managing the ship as interim CEO. Conrad is a current member of the Sonos board, but is a co-founder of Pandora, VP of Snap and chief product officer of, wait for it, the . He too reportedly has a Sonos tattoo. The board has hired a firm to find a new long-term leader.
“I think we can all agree that this year we took too much for granted,” Conrad wrote to employees in a letter. “A return to basics is necessary, but clearly not enough to unlock the future we all dream of for Sonos.” He also suggested that he would like the company to expand “beyond” home speakers and related equipment.
As for Spence, he’s fine. His payout package includes $7,500 per month through June, a cash severance of $1.9 million and his unvested Sonos shares. He has been with Sonos for over a decade.
The decision to replace the leadership comes after months of turmoil at the company. It launched a mobile app in May that was completely riddled with bugs and missing important features like alarms and sleep timers. Some customers even complained that entire speaker systems stopped working after updating to the new app. It’s a whole thing.
Sonos by extending the manufacturer’s warranty for home speaker products and creating an advisory board that will provide the company with “feedback and insights from the customer’s perspective to help shape and improve our software and products before they launch.”
That did not ease the financial burden the company faced. The stock price has fallen by nearly 13 percent since the app was launched. Sonos laid off more than 100 people in August as it tried to fix software and revenue fell 16 percent in the fiscal fourth quarter, which ended Sept. 28. Analysts had projected an additional 15 percent reduction throughout the holiday season.