Sonos CEO behind disastrous app exits with $1.9 million severance pay

Conrad was CTO of Pandora for 10 years, VP of product at Snapchat for two years, and chief product officer at the failed Quibi streaming service. He has spearheaded the effort to fix the app along with Nick Millington, Sonos’ product manager and the architect behind the original app, Sonos spokeswoman Erin Pategas said. The edge.

Sonos failed customers

Management succeeding Spence have their work cut out for them after Sonos tanked customer relations last year and frustrated employees worried about pushing the app out.

“When (the app’s user experience) doesn’t work, our customers are taken out of the moment and have a right to feel like we’ve failed them,” Conrad said in an email to employees. “I think we will all agree that this year we have failed too many people.”

In the letter (which you can read in its entirety at The edge), Conrad pointed to “notable” product releases brought down by the bad app. Such products are insufficient “when our customers’ alarms don’t go off, their kids can’t hear their playlist during breakfast, their surroundings don’t fire up, or they can’t pause the music in time to answer the buzzing doorbell,” Conrad wrote.

Conrad and the next CEO will have to work to not only improve Sonos’ value, but also to convince users that Sonos is equipped to handle their long-standing interests and demands as well as future endeavors. A big driver of Sonos’ app woes was the need to develop the software to support mobile devices, such as the Ace. In August, Spence noted to investors that the maligned app was “a redesign of the entire system — not just the app, but also the player side of our system as well as our cloud infrastructure.”

Interim CEO Conrad seems intent on appeasing disappointed customers and continuing to push Sonos toward a cloud-dependent future.

“Getting back to basics is necessary, but clearly not enough to unlock the future we all envision for Sonos,” Conrad told employees, noting the desire to push Sonos “well beyond” home audio.

At least for now, clients seem happy that Spence will no longer be leading those efforts.

“Well deserved,” a Reddit user wrote today in a post that has hundreds of upvotes as of this writing. “Imagine doing that much reputational and functional damage to a previously well-regarded go-to brand.”