There are a few people in upper management as well as executives that need to be removed from the company. They need to be replaced with competent leadership or Bose won’t survive. For change to happen it should have started at the top - then worked its way down. Instead we laid off experienced valuable employees and kept the fat at the top.
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You are correct, I was laid off in 2018 and saw it coming. My manager was incompetent, she literally did not know how to hook a printer up to her laptop and had no clue how to use any of the systems at Bose yet was moved to manager simply because her boss didn't like to deal with people. When projects failed because of her poor leadership, she tossed people under the bus to save her job until (like the old saying goes) there was no-one left to toss so she went under in 2020.
I think it's a long hangover from the first few decades of the company, under Dr.Bose's leadership, to see the CEO as the one to be in charge of product strategy. Responsibilities like establishing a winning organizational culture; managing, developing, and enforcing accountability for the senior leadership; managing the budget and identifying appropriate risks; and winning the confidence of the Board are all far more important at a company Bose's size than envisioning the next big product.
Those responsibilities are 60% independent of the actual business of the company.
Laid against the last three insightful contributions, large portions which I agree with and would rest slivers of hope on - Where exactly does the new CEO fall in this? Her background and career experience, while seriously very impressive, is an unclear intersection with the current Bose. And where one might see the natural momentum taking Bose into the next year or two.
While acknowledging her MIT Mechanical Eng PhD, it appears she has little to nil implementation experience in the technical spaces discussed. Then there are her years as a partner at McKinsey prior to Pitney Bowes.
Her tenure has been so short, it is hard to see she has been much more than a bystander to all of the layoffs in motion this month, the push of new products to market last month, the selling results over the next two months, and the assessment of "more layoffs?" that has been happening each Dec/Jan. It will be very interesting to see when she becomes more visible and impactful to the operations, beyond the current "getting to know you" visibility.
To be clear, I am not seeking to bash on the new CEO. Quite the opposite.
Rather, my personal quest to try and rationalize the internal and external as to where Bose is actually heading. Maybe that is a fool's errand, not sure. It seems like there is another big course change coming in 2021.
Engineers know the recovery plan @1htq+17EoZqzZ . It was known from couple of years back. I am not waiting for a surprise that anything will change. They will listen to consultants and MBA's who have no track record of much technical work getting decimated and their lunch eaten.
What the company should do?
Stage 1 - Acceptance & Awareness:
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First understanding the speaker/wearables scene has changed immensely.
Stop living inside the 'Bose is the best' bubble. - Competitors are able to produce products that have reasonably very good audio quality.
- Customers overall care more about reliability / ease of use than "audio" quality.
- It's about time to change the pricing model, and have some awareness about the total-addressable market. Hyping up stuff, and exorbitant prices won't help. Half the ppl in the company won't buy Bose products unless they get the 50% discount.
- Keeping the price more than apple products is going to get us no-where.
Stage 2: Implementing changes - baby steps:
- First try to break-even after the layoffs by reducing the price of products a bit.
- Invest in real innovation, where it matters, instead of just saying - The audio now is much better. Also please as a company ensure all employees are aware of what those innovations are. 75% of the employees have no clue about them. Try to really figure out what the customer wants.
- Just investing them will get no where - ensure they are productized for heaven's sake. IMO, there are a bunch of several patents that never made it into products. Be aware of them.
- Please do not break backwards compatibility. It really really s—s. Remember the how the new products were supposed to be super awesome? And that never happened.
Stage3: Some real change.
- Decide on a product - stick to those requirements, come up with a good reliable team, give full-freedom to them, for heaven's sake appreciate them - when they do well.
- Mobile Apps - The quality of it is on the negative scale. Hackathons can produce better reliable ones. Some serious change is needed there. Also - rethink the need for 4-5 apps if one has 4-5 Bose products. It become bloatware.
Stage4: Deep-diving & into some tech stuff:
Finding answers to the real questions, and making good changes.
- Why are we so reliant on 3rd party vendors? We are we just modifying their code?
- Why is our BT stack so damn outdated?
- Why is the code-quality so damn bad?
- Why does the CI/CD s— big time? Best practices are not followed here. Definitely the company should understand the past mistakes - Investing in CICD in cloud, and in embedded side, Why wasn't it integrated into one single functioning unit??
- Why is real tech debt getting outsourced? ( I understand the cheap-labor idea, but really, is that the future operating model?)
- Why aren't feature teams that have implemented innovative ideas not taken into production?
- How are engineering managers evaluated? (Just leading teams is not enough, and taking decisions is not enough) Why are they not coding and supporting teams? Some just simply police around.
- Why sticking to C++11? Why hasn't no one made any progress to move to C++17?
9 . Why not move to C++ on the wearables side? Why isn't any open-source embedded stuff being used? Why didn't anyone analyze the pro's and con's of that?
- Why is Bose paying engineers so damn low? Not even meeting the market standards? Also are performance reviews really fair for everyone?
More questions:
- Apart from cost savings through layoffs - how is the new CEO going to be evaluated? What new ideas in tech, supply-chain / manufacturing is being discussed or implemented in her team? Did we really need a new CEO, amidst our financial struggles?
There are too many managers and PMs who track and monitor the same issue 2 / 3 times a day. Almost everyone is either a Lead without a team to lead or manager or PM. More leads, managers and PMs than individuals. Some PMs don't even know where exactly the problem lies and host meetings to keep everyone busy. Some are with the company for so long that they do not know what is going on outside. If things don't get fixed soon , then no matter what Bose does its hardship wont end.
I've been saying that since I started - 16 years ago
Some things can't be fixed, but can fail to not matter any more.
To OP, that's a decision for the board and owners. It's their business to lose. People can always find employment elsewhere, for better or worse. For Bose owners, they have to understand why their business is failing and I don't think they do, or worse, they do know why it's failing and don't know how to fix it
What would you rather do @OP+17EoZqzZ ? Is the company changing?