Sonos has been dealt a major blow after one of the most respected technology product gurus in the industry and a director of Sonos quit.
When Panos Panay joined the Sonos board in 2020 Sonos management were doing handstands with gushing praise dished out to media organisations.
Now Panay has quit, with Sonos management slinking off to the US Securities and Exchange Commission to quietly announce that he has decided to call it quits at the struggling US audio Company whose share value is down 26% year to date.
Panay told Sonos management that he is heading over to archrival Amazon to take over the role as head of its Devices and Services division.
This move was announced by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy the same day that Panay resigned from the Sonos board.
This is the division that designs and manufactures network audio speakers that compete up against Sonos.
The former Chief Product Officer at Microsoft is now set to compete head on with Sonos, as Amazon looks to expand their audio and voice activation technology along with new Matter products going forward.
In an effort to counter the negative impact of Panay quitting Sonos management moved quickly to make their own announcements.
Patrick Spence, Sonos,
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence announced that three new appointments were joining the executive team at Sonos.
The appointments included Deirdre Findlay as its new Chief Commercial Officer, Dunja LaRosa as its Chief Revenue Officer, and Maxime Bouvat-Merlin as its Chief Product Officer.
He said that he was “Excited to welcome a new group of highly accomplished executives into key leadership roles at Sonos. We are adding world class talent across marketing, sales and product, focused on achieving our ambition to be the world’s leading sound experience company. Each will be integral in further strengthening our brand and executing on the opportunity in front of us.
The only problem was that in his desperation to minimise the impact of Panay quitting he forgot to admit that two of the three had been working at Sonos for some time.
Deirdre Findlay joined the Sonos board at the same time that Panay did back in 2020.
At that time, she was Chief Marketing Officer for Condé Nast the owner of Vogue.
Now as Sonos Chief Commercial Officer, Findlay will be responsible for all go-to-market and customer experience functions.
Similarly, Maxime Bouvat-Merlin has been working for Sonos since 2016, when he joined the company as Vice President of HW Product Development.
Prior to Sonos, Bouvat-Merlin did stints at QuickLogic, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Texas Instruments.
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