On Monday, Patrick Spence, the CEO of Sonos, known primarily for its wireless speakers and premium quality headsets, left his position with immediate effect. So far, the case in itself would not have any serious news value, but Spence is probably the first company manager in history who had to leave due to a botched application update and its catastrophic consequences.
Sonos faced real public anger last May, when the company hastily released a new version of the more or less essential control application for the use of its sound systems, which was full of bugs and lacked basic functions widely used by users.
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The imposition on customers of an application that can be classified as half-finished even with the greatest goodwill resulted in a school example of the domino effect, and in Sonos, not only the trust of the users was seriously shaken, but also that of the employees, which was only compounded by the fact that the management was even forced to reduce staff last year as an indirect consequence of the case in summer.
The company tried several times to apologize to the users, and announced several measures that were meant to guarantee that a similar case would not occur in the future, but the PR disaster was so complete that even the crisis management team contracted in the meantime could not do anything about it. .
In the meantime, the case also caused an extremely serious financial disadvantage for the company, whose sales fell by 14-15 percent in the third and fourth quarters of last year.
Finally, in mid-January, the unthinkable happened: the damage caused by the hastily issued application cost Spence. The outgoing company manager worked at Sonos for more than a decade, including eight years as the company’s number one manager. He was temporarily replaced by Tom Conrad, who was the midwife at the birth of Pandora and also holds the position of vice president of Snap.
Source: www.hwsw.hu
