A day after announcing that CEO Patrick Spence is departing the company, Sonos revealed that Chief Product Officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin is also leaving. Bouvat-Merlin has been CPO since 2023.
As first reported by Bloomberg, Sonos will not fill the chief product officer role. Instead, Tom Conrad, the interim CEO Sonos announced yesterday, will take on the role's responsibilities. In an email to staff cited by Bloomberg (you can read the letter in its entirety at The Verge), Conrad explained:
With my stepping in as CEO, the board, Max, and I have agreed that my background makes the chief product officer role redundant. Therefore, Max’s role is being eliminated and the product organization will report directly to me. I’ve asked Max to advise me over the next period to ensure a smooth transition and I am grateful that he’s agreed to do that.In May, Sonos released an update to its app that led to customers, many of them long-time users, revolting over broken features, like accessibility capabilities and the ability to set timers. Sonos expects that remedying the app and Sonos' reputation will cost it at least $20 million to $30 million. As head of the company, Spence received a lot of blame and has also been criticized for not apologizing for the problems until July. However, numerous reports have also attributed blame to Bouvat-Merlin. Today, The Verge noted that "some employees" have told it that Bouvat-Merlin is largely responsible for the reputation loss associated with the app and for the decision to rush the app's release. Former and current employees have said that the app was pushed out prematurely so that it could be available for Sonos' first wireless headphones, which came out in June. Spence admitted in August that after Sonos released the app "it became evident that there were stubborn bugs we had not discovered in our testing." In September, two former employees told Bloomberg that ahead of what would be a disastrous app launch, Bouvat-Merlin forced chaotic reorganizations that separated people who had worked together for years. Bouvat-Merlin also failed to assuage customer frustrations when he responded to customer complaints in May by telling The Verge that it "takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future." With Sonos committed to using the new app and expanding its products, including mobile audio devices that rely on the cloud, more changes are expected for the brand. So far, that has meant removing two company leaders from their positions.