Audio products maker Sonos has been sailing in troubled waters for the past year. It has been taking a beating both financially and in the public eye after the launch of a poorly redesigned app last year. Since then, Sonos’s CEO Patrick Spence and Chief Product Officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin have left the company. It has also changed some of its product plans. Now, Sonos has announced that it is going to cut 200 jobs from its workforce as part of the restructuring.
Sonos is cutting nearly 12 percent of jobs in further restructuring push
Since last year, Sonos has been trying everything to recover financially. Sonos is now reducing the total size of its workforce by cutting nearly 12 percent of jobs. It’s worth mentioning that Sonos already laid off 100 of its employees in August last year. At the time, the layoffs affected the employees from the company’s marketing department the most. As of now, it’s not clear which division is impacting its employees the most through the latest layoffs.
Sonos’ recently appointed interim chief executive, Tom Conrad, said the company is “reorganizing our Product organization into functional groups for Hardware, Software, Design, Quality, and Operations, and away from dedicated business units devoted to individual product categories. With this simpler organization in place, cross-functional project teams will come together to improve our core experience and deliver new products”.
Sonos introduced its new application for Android, iOS, and desktops in May last year. It arrived without any core functionalities like sleep timers and alarms. Also, the consumers reported problems rearranging speakers in different rooms, some not working properly, and issues completing other basic tasks. Some of the users even complained that they often couldn’t load the app on the first try. Sonos users poorly received the app, which ultimately affected it financially. Sonos had to rethink its strategy going forward, eliminating many jobs as part of the process.
New plans for revival
In the latest restructuring push, the company will reorganize teams to be smaller and more focused. Furthermore, Sonos is trying to revive itself by entering a new product category. Sonos is now planning to launch a streaming box device that will compete against the likes of Apple TV and Roku streaming devices. Sonos is working on this device under the “Pinewood” codename and it is going to be a premium offering, suggest the reports.
Furthermore, the reports indicate that the Sonos streaming box is shaping up to be a content-rich product. It will be able to offer content from all popular OTT platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max. Sonos could price the streaming box somewhere between $150 and $400. We can expect the rumor mill to reveal more details about it in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
