Struggling US sound company Sonos has sacked several of its most senior design and product management executives, the same people who were involved in the disastrous app redesign that crashed sound systems and has weighed on the business for the better part of two years.

The company confirmed the departures overnight, in a move that Bloomberg has questioned as one that could inhibit Sonos’ ability to develop breakthrough audio products going forward.

ChannelNews understands the company is desperate to cut costs and reengineer the business as management struggles to grow sales in multiple countries, including Australia.

Sonos, which normally chases PR or attempts to shut down media stories, as ChannelNews has experienced in the past, did not report the axings to the stock exchange. Its shares are down 20.8 per cent year to date.

Who Is Out

The latest cuts include Dana Krieger, the former vice president of design who worked at Sonos for 12 years and was heavily involved in the botched redesign of the Sonos app.

Also out is Kate Wojogbe, a top user experience executive who was with the company for nearly 10 years, and Scott Fink, a 15-year veteran who worked on the company’s home theatre and custom install products.

Michelle Enright, a senior design director who oversaw the company’s packaging and product sustainability efforts, was another casualty of the fallout from the app development failure.

Kristen Leclerc, who most recently served as head of the user experience research department, was laid off after eight years.

“The design team is a little smaller now,” Edward Mitchell, a departing designer who spent nearly 12 years at the Goleta, California-based company, wrote on LinkedIn.

“Nearly the entire UX Research team was let go,” Rebecca Phillips, a user experience researcher, said in another post.

Fourth Round Of Cuts In Two Years

Across the past two years Sonos has run four separate rounds of retrenchments, totalling close to 360 jobs.

In August 2024, Sonos cut around 100 jobs, mainly in marketing, in a move it framed as ensuring long-term success and continued investment.

Then CEO Patrick Spence admitted his push for speed in product delivery led to the botched Sonos app launch of May 2024, which was the trigger for a further 200 job cuts.

Spence was sacked in January 2025. His departure saw the appointment of former board member Tom Conrad, who briefly served as interim CEO before taking on the top job permanently in July 2025.

Conrad is framing the latest changes as a way to reduce management layers and make the company more competitive.

“I want a Sonos that moves with more conviction and more velocity,” he said in a memo to the shrinking number of staff the company has left.

Announcing an earlier restructure, Conrad said the company was reorganising its product organisation into functional groups for hardware, software, design, quality and operations, moving away from dedicated business units for individual product categories.

In his letter to staff he was blunt about the rationale, saying that being smaller and more focused would require the company to do a much better job of prioritising, and that too many projects had been running under a cloud of half commitment.

The company estimated US$15 million to US$18 million in restructuring charges, substantially all related to severance and benefits.

Insiders Question The Strategy

Some longtime employees disagree with Conrad’s explanation and see the reductions as a cost-cutting measure now that Sonos’ product pipeline is largely settled for the next couple of years.

They also question the timing, given that the company recently touted revenue growth, and are alarmed at the loss of institutional knowledge and culture setters.

After the software launch disaster weighed on Sonos’ business for close to two years, deep cuts to user research are also being seen as a cause for concern.

Insiders believe that while the company’s software and hardware divisions were largely spared, eliminating so many high-profile roles vital to product creation and development could have unforeseen consequences for Sonos’ ability to roll out new devices on schedule and at the planned quality.

New Products On The Way

Desperate to get traction for new products, Sonos has a second-generation pair of wireless headphones on its road map to follow the Sonos Ace, along with a revamped home theatre solution currently in development.

The brand is facing a fresh wave of competition from rivals including Bose, Samsung Electronics, the Harman group of audio companies and Sony, all of whom seized on Sonos’ decision to pause new consumer hardware for over a year as it tackled the app crisis.

Conrad claims his top priority is selling consumers on the unique strengths of Sonos’ whole-home audio platform rather than any individual device.

“The Sonos system is the product,” he said in May. “Each device we add and each improvement we make increases the value of the whole system, compounding over time as customers expand across rooms and use cases.”