Photo Credit: Jako Janse van Rensburg
Sonos struggles abound as the company announces restructuring efforts, laying off around 200 employees in the second round of layoffs in six months.
Sonos is still struggling to keep its head above water since its bungled app update last year. Ahead of the company’s first quarter earnings reveal this week, Sonos announced in a letter to employees from interim CEO Tom Conrad that restructuring efforts are on the way. And it should come as no surprise that this means more layoffs — 12% of its total workforce this time around.
The news came first in an internal letter to employees at around 4PM ET, followed by a post on Sonos’ website shortly thereafter. “We’ve become mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be,” wrote Conrad. “So across the company today we are reorganizing into flatter, smaller, and more focused teams.”
Given that the decision to let folks go was announced just a day before Sonos plans to report its latest quarterly earnings, those numbers probably aren’t great. Sonos’ reputation was heavily tarnished by last year’s controversy surrounding changes made to the company’s app, leaving crucial features out and pissing off devoted customers en masse.
That situation became so dire for the company’s business that Sonos ousted former CEO Patrick Spence just last month. The company also made a wave of job cuts back in August to alleviate some of the pressure, letting around 100 people go.
Sonos is still working to undo the issues caused by the major update to its app back in May. The app is still missing many essential features, and has been tremendously buggy due to going live well before the update was actually ready for customers. Yet another round of layoffs will do nothing to rectify plummeting employee morale, nor restore much customer faith in the company.
The company’s next planned hardware launch is a high-end streaming player to complement the success of its Arc Ultra soundbar last year. That product was well-received, but news of its launch was vastly overshadowed by the disastrous app overhaul.