Sonos lays off 200 employees as its struggles continue

Things at Sonos are getting worse before they get better — if they’re going to get better. Today the company laid off approximately 200 employees, The Verge has learned. The news was announced at around 4PM ET, and a letter to employees from interim CEO Tom Conrad was posted on Sonos’ website shortly thereafter. “One thing I’ve observed first hand is that we’ve become mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be,” Conrad wrote. “So across the company today we are reorganizing into flatter, smaller, and more focused teams.” Conrad clearly sees a need to rethink the way Sonos operates as part of the company’s turnaround effort. Sonos is scheduled to report its latest quarterly earnings on Thursday afternoon. And if this is the precursor to that, the near-term outlook probably isn’t very good. It’s an even more substantial wave of job cuts than Sonos made back in August, when it let 100 people go. The company remains in an unenviable position, facing cooling demand for its products and a reputation that has been badly tarnished by last year’s app controversy. The situation eventually became so damaging to Sonos’ business that it led to the ouster of former CEO Patrick Spence last month. Conrad has pledged to continue improving the mobile app after the company carelessly released a major overhaul of the software back in May — well before it was actually ready for Sonos customers. The new app was buggy out of the gate and missing many features. Sonos has spent the months since trying to make up for its colossal misstep. But another round of layoffs at the company could further harm morale among employees who are still doing their best to rectify the mistakes of previous leadership. Sonos will now divide its product organization into groups for hardware, software, design, quality and operations “and away from dedicated business units devoted to individual product categories,” Conrad wrote. “Being smaller and more focused will require us to do a much better job of prioritizing our work — lately we’ve let too many projects run under a cloud of half-commitment. We’re going to fix this too,” he added. After releasing the well-received Arc Ultra soundbar late last year, Sonos’ next planned hardware release is a high-end streaming player that doubles as an HDMI switch, among other capabilities.