Sonos CEO Patrick Spence has been dumped after eight years, the begging question is why it took the board so long, to realise that the Company under his management was going backwards instead of forward with several of his decisions leading to questions about his decision making.

The Sonos board has appointed iTom Conrad as inerim CEO.

Spence who was seen as a ‘Woke’ CEO by former employees, oversaw the decline of the Company primarily due to what has been described to ChannelNews as “Seriously poor management decisions” that came to a head with the release of a disastrous app that crashed Sonos systems, and led to layoffs at the Company.

This is the same CEO who at one stage was so desperate to grow sales, that he approved the nobbling of Sonos speakers and their their questionable proprietary operating system in an effort to try and force owners of a Sonos sound system to buy a new Sonos speaker simply to get Bluetooth which was missing from their original OS.

His exit from the US sound Company is effective immediately, with board member Tom Conrad appointed as the stand in CEO.

Desperate to launch their new Sonos Ace headphones which needed a new app to operate, Spence approved the launch of an app that was buggy, poorly designed and above all crashed millions of Sonos sound systems around the world including widely across Australia.The move outraged customers and led to a PR disaster and a slump in both profits and sales.

As for the launch of their Ace headphones this has been a total disaster with sales failing to meet forecasts.

Sonos’ community forums and subreddit have been dominated by complaints and an overwhelmingly negative sentiment towards the Company with insiders at CES telling ChannelNews “The brand is broken”.

Desperate for sales Sonos rolled out a major TV marketing campaign in both the USA and Australia ahead of Black Friday, US Thanksgiving sand the peak Xmas New Year sales period. ChannelNews understands that that failed to deliver the sales lift the Company expected.

In October, Spence who at this stage was desperate to save his own job, announced a turnaround plan, claiming the Company was strengthening product development principles, introducing new transparency polices internally, he also a PR crisis management team in an effort to try and mitigate the disaster that was unfolding at the Company.

His final debacle came in May 2024 when the company rolled out their new new mobile app that consumers needed  to control their speakers and other equipment, within hours customers realised it was was riddled with bugs.

Among the problems, the user interface confused customers, lost key accessibility features, and removed capabilities like the sleep timer and alarms.

The bottom line was their latest app disaster was the last straw for the Sonos board with Spence dumped immediately.

The new acting CEO Tom Conrad was a board member and former executive at Snap and the Pandora music streaming service.

Shares of Sonos fell as much as 6.1% to US$13.64 after trading opened in New York last night.

Ironically, chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin, who some employees claim should also be dumped and deserves a fair share of the blame for recent missteps, will remain in his role.

“We’re going to initiate a search for the next CEO, and we’ll work on finding a leader who’s going to continue to build on our legacy and work with the team to move the company forward,” Sonos spokesperson Erin Pategas told Bloomberg.

She described the leadership change as “turning a page on the chapter that we’re in and forging a path ahead that gets us in the direction that we want to be going for ourselves and our customers.”

At this stage it’s not known what sort of payout Spence got.