Sonos remains in the throes of the biggest controversy in its history — and it’s one of the company’s own making. Now, several months after the May release of its overhauled app badly tarnished the brand’s reputation, CEO Patrick Spence has announced a multipart plan to right the ship.
You can break the strategy down into two main objectives. First, Sonos has taken steps to thoroughly understand just how the hell everything went so wrong — both with its software development practices and its underlying corporate culture — that it somehow wound up in this predicament to begin with. And second, the company is kicking off a broad effort intended to rebuild the trust of its customers and convince them that nothing like this will ever happen again.
For once, there are actual stakes involved, albeit minor ones. Sonos says its executive leadership team will not accept their annual bonus payouts “unless the company succeeds in improving the quality of the app experience and rebuilding customer trust.” That’ll inevitably prompt an eye roll from some people; these executives still earn high pay and heaps of Sonos stock. But I guess it’s some motivation to keep pushing in the right direction.
If you’ve purchased a Sonos speaker within the last year, here’s an important thing to know: the company is extending its manufacturer warranty by an additional year for select products that are still under warranty right now. This won’t bring older devices back under coverage, but it’ll provide a little extra peace of mind as Sonos works through this rough patch. (Note that the extension only applies to “home theater and plug-in speaker products,” meaning the Sonos Move, Move 2, Roam, and Roam 2 are excluded.)
Now, let’s get back to the rest of this plan. Some of what Sonos is promising today is rather… vague. For example, take this whole bullet point from the company’s press release, which doesn’t really mean much of anything:
Unwavering focus on the customer experience: To ensure that we deliver the highest level of customer experience, we will always establish ambitious quality benchmarks at the outset of product development and will not launch products before meeting these criteria. We will also enhance the tools necessary to measure the quality of the experience actually being delivered to customers to ensure that we maintain the standards our customers expect.
Maybe that has significance internally at the company, but it reads like pure PR speak from the outside. Thankfully, Sonos is more specific elsewhere, vowing to implement a more stringent testing phase and beta program for all products — both hardware and software — that “will include more types of customers and more diverse setups for a longer testing period. This will allow us to find, diagnose and solve customer concerns more quickly before going to market.”
Spence has admitted on multiple occasions that with the new app, Sonos moved too fast and failed to recognize the full gravity of bugs, missing features, and reduced functionality that led to an overwhelmingly negative reception upon its debut in May. Fundamentals like queue management, local library support, alarms, and even some accessibility options were either absent or broken.
Sonos gave its latest progress report today, saying, “more than 80 percent of the app’s missing features have been reintroduced and the company expects to have almost 100 percent restored in the coming weeks. The reliability and speed of the app has improved with each release.”
With hindsight, Spence has acknowledged that Sonos should have introduced the new software as a beta, leaving the former “S2” app in place while bringing the two to parity over time. But that’s not what happened, which brings us to the next pledge:
Demonstrate humility when introducing changes: In contrast to the all-at-once automated app release we issued in May, any major change to the Sonos app will be released gradually, allowing customers to adjust and provide feedback before it becomes the default. For new features smaller in scope, we will introduce an opt-in experimental features option in the app for customers who would like to participate in testing them.
For everyone whose trust in the company has been shaken, that’s the most important change outlined in today’s press release. It’s at least evidence that Sonos has learned a critical lesson and won’t ever put customers through this kind of whiplash again.
Sonos is also taking steps to level up transparency both inside the company and beyond. After reports of prelaunch meetings that involved screaming and yelling over the new app’s dire state, the company is creating a “quality ombudsperson” role that “will ensure our employees have a clear path to escalate any concerns in terms of quality and customer experience.” The ombudsperson “will be consulted by executive leadership throughout the development process and before any product launches” and will publish a report twice each year, also making routine presentations to the Sonos board.
I’ve heard from multiple sources at the company who insist that concerns were raised and alarms were sounded throughout the app’s development, but Sonos leadership forged ahead with the release anyway. “They weren’t just told; they were warned,” one employee told me. Appointing an ombudsperson is clearly an attempt to prevent that exact scenario from playing out again in the future.
Inside Sonos, morale has taken a serious hit, and there’s been plenty of finger-pointing in the wake of such a colossal unforced error, with some employees questioning the judgment of chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin. But in an email, Sonos chief strategy officer Eddie Lazarus told me that no changes to the product division are anticipated. “As a leadership team, we made the decision together to launch the app,” he said.
Sonos customers will at least soon be given a louder voice at the table: the company says it will assemble a customer advisory board that will “provide feedback and insights from a customer perspective to help shape and improve our software and products before they are launched.” The details of what that advisory board will look like are still being finalized, Lazarus said.
So that’s the general rundown on where Sonos is headed over the next several months. As it looks to get back on track, I can report that the company will resume its planned hardware releases in the coming weeks, beginning with the Sonos Arc Ultra and Sub 4. The Arc Ultra will be the first product to contain “breakthrough” transducer technology developed by Mayht, a startup that Sonos acquired in 2022. The soundbar, codenamed Lasso, will deliver significantly richer sound and pack more of a bass punch than the original Arc.
Still, this app debacle is certain to have repercussions that extend well into the future. Sonos has managed to self-sabotage the impact of its first-ever headphones, the Sonos Ace. The Ace quickly fell by the wayside thanks to this ordeal and have yet to regain much momentum. Improvements keep coming, but early sales of the headphones have reportedly been dismal.
More importantly, questionable decisions by the company’s leadership have had severe consequences for dedicated, hard-working employees: in August, Sonos laid off 100 people. The cuts included roles in software quality, platforms / infrastructure, marketing, and other departments.
Among those laid off were two employees who tried their best to address what was then a growing outcry over the new Sonos app with a community Q&A back in mid-May.