Sonos loses a decade of design talent as layoffs hit its top ranks

Senior design, product, and research leaders with 10 years or more at the company are out, in a restructuring the chief executive calls speed and some staff call cost-cutting.

“The design team is a little smaller now,” Edward Mitchell, a Sonos designer of roughly 12 years’ standing, wrote on LinkedIn as the audio company parted ways with a swathe of its most senior product and design leaders.

Sonos has pushed out several long-serving executives in recent weeks in cuts that reach far higher up the organisation than a routine trim.

Among those leaving are Dana Krieger, a vice-president of design with 12 years at the company, Kate Wojogbe, a senior user-experience executive of nearly a decade, and Scott Fink, a 15-year veteran who helped build the home-theatre business that gave Sonos much of its living-room identity.

The losses run right through the teams that shape how Sonos products look and feel. Michelle Enright, who led packaging and product sustainability, left after 14 years, and Sara Lincoln, a hardware product manager, departed after 11.

Rebecca Phillips, a user-experience researcher, wrote that “nearly the entire UX research team was let go,” while Kristen Leclerc, who ran user research, was also among those cut.

The departures sit within a broader reduction. Sonos confirmed last month that it was cutting about 3% of staff, weighted toward the user-experience and product groups behind its app, the same software it has been painstakingly rebuilding after a botched 2024 overhaul triggered a customer revolt.

Chief executive Tom Conrad framed the changes as a matter of speed rather than savings. In an internal memo seen by Bloomberg, he wrote that he wants “a Sonos that moves with more conviction and more velocity,” with “fewer months in conference rooms” and “more prototypes in our labs.”

The stated aim is to strip out management layers and make the company nimbler.

A company spokesperson said Sonos still has experienced leaders across the affected teams and that user-research work would continue, and stressed that the cuts were not related to artificial intelligence. That last point sits a little awkwardly next to Conrad’s own words.

On a May earnings call, he said AI was “already transforming how we operate internally, from the way we build software to how we execute marketing to how I run the company.”

The company’s insistence that the reductions have nothing to do with automation makes it something of an outlier at a moment when many firms are explicitly pinning cuts on AI.

Not everyone inside the building accepts the official framing. Some longtime staff reportedly see the layoffs as primarily a cost-cutting exercise, and worry that removing experienced designers and researchers will hurt both future products and the culture that produced them.

The timing is delicate. Conrad took over from Patrick Spence, who stepped down in early 2025 after the 2024 app redesign sparked a rare consumer backlash and dented Sonos’s hard-won reputation for polish. Initially installed on an interim basis, Conrad was later confirmed as permanent chief executive.

For a company whose identity rests on design and hardware craft, losing more than a decade of institutional memory in a single round is a gamble. The people being let go are, in several cases, the ones who shaped the packaging, the interfaces, and the home-theatre systems that made the brand feel premium in the first place.

Sonos says it is still developing new products, including a second-generation Ace headphone and updated home-theatre gear, and Conrad is betting that a leaner, faster organisation will ship them sooner.

The pitch to investors and staff alike is that fewer meetings and more prototypes will translate into a quicker cadence of releases. Whether velocity can substitute for the experience walking out of the door is the question hanging over the restructuring.

The worry voiced by former employees is not that Sonos cannot build its next speaker, but that the harder, less obvious work of dreaming up a breakthrough product tends to rest on exactly the kind of senior judgment now being cut.