Sonos · Organizational design
Redesigning priorities, partnerships, and development to preserve strategic coverage through organizational change.
The problem
After a reduction in force, nine designers became six while critical programs across portable products, headphones, setup, configuration, and home theater still needed support. The change also exposed an existing weakness: software design often entered hardware programs after the most consequential decisions had already hardened.
I could spread specialists more thinly, or redesign how the team worked.
Decision one
I established explicit criteria for dedicated staffing: a clear business objective, a blocking customer issue, or a committed roadmap date. Strategic commitments received embedded ownership; less-defined opportunities received office hours and targeted working sessions rather than automatic staffing.
This forced difficult choices, but it replaced hidden overload with transparent portfolio decisions. Teams could see what we were protecting, what we were releasing, and why.
Decision two
Rather than treating hardware and software design as sequential specialties, I paired ownership earlier, through incubation, creation, and realization. Shared problem sessions and all-team critique replaced discipline-specific status reviews.
The new model let systems thinking influence component decisions, setup requirements, and launch scope before expensive constraints were locked in.
Decision three
I matched development opportunities to business need, individual readiness, and specialist strengths. Supported exposure became independent leadership: designers moved from smaller programs into strategic cross-system work with coaching that gradually shifted from answers to context and decision support.
That protected essential specialization while increasing the team’s ability to lead ambiguous, interconnected programs.
What changed
With roughly one-third fewer designers, the team continued covering the same strategic roadmap. We deliberately reduced support for lower-priority enhancements, while earlier cross-system collaboration improved the quality and realism of product decisions.