Sonos employees knew app was botched, execs launched it anyway

A new report from Bloomberg details the inner workings of Sonos leading up to the launch of its new app. It details how a decade of tech debt, an internal shakeup and the pressure of being a public company created a melting pot of poor decisions that led to the unrefined app launching this May.

Sonos has been building on its initial platform for years, and the report claims that the company was sitting on a mountain of technical debt and code written in outdated coding languages. Sonos planned to tackle this starting in the middle of 2022, but the lack of urgency slowed this project. That is until the company decided to pivot into headphones, which needed a whole new app to support them since they were Sonos’ first product that didn’t tie into your home Wi-Fi network.

Sonos put a lot of pressure on the Ace headphones because its sales subsided after a pandemic boom when many people decided to upgrade their home or TV audio systems while stuck at home. On top of that, Canadian CEO Patrick Spence decided that the company would accelerate its product cycle with two new products yearly. In addition to the company’s layoffs, the pressure and speed at which Sonos worked led to more cut corners to appease its shareholders rather than its customers.

This two-product per-year plan has since been put on hold as the company focuses on repairing the app.

The Bloomberg report also mentions that the company’s chief product officer took to restructuring its employees, moving people around, and upending teams that had worked together for years, which led to some internal friction.

Sonos employees expressed frustrations in meetings and were able to push back the app launch to May, but Sonos continued to move forward with the app even though it was made clear internally that it wasn’t ready. The employees voiced concerns that the company’s shift towards appeasing shareholders instead of customers would backfire. Some employees who spoke with Bloomberg also mentioned that many employees were afraid to speak out due to recent layoffs.

Overall, it seems that Sono’s push to continually grow its company with a strategy that looked good in the boardroom was detached from a lot of the actual work happening on the ground. This has led Spence on an apology tour and taken the company’s share price down around 25 percent this year.

My experience with the new app was rocky a few months ago, but since then, the company has released a slate of updates that have fixed my issues. Since I set my system back up three or so weeks ago, I have had no issues.

Source: Bloomberg