The Woman Fixing a Microsoft Mess With Brutal Honesty -- WSJ

By Ben Fritz | Photography by Charissa Soriano for WSJ

REDMOND, Wash.-Asha Sharma had zero experience in videogames when Microsoft put her in charge of cleaning up its Xbox business.

Her approach has been to aggressively share bad news.

While videogames have never been more popular, Xbox isn't growing. Its revenue of about $23 billion is declining, and the 14,000-person unit's profit margin is a paltry 3%. Its GamePass subscription service has fallen far short of projections.

People who work with Sharma know all this because she repeats these facts in meetings and memos as she tries to fix the business with massive layoffs, strategic pivots and a radical reshuffling of investment priorities.

"Great companies are incredibly comfortable sharing successes and sharing wins," she said at a town hall in the offices of one of her most important franchises, "Minecraft," last month. "Every company needs to be better at sharing hard things and clear realities."

Sharma has a mantra she tells colleagues: "Clarity is kindness."

In her small-by-C-suite-standards office on Microsoft's corporate campus, the 38-year-old mother of three said that philosophy has guided her astonishingly rapid ascent through the leadership of companies like Meta Platforms and Instacart.

Sharma was promoted to CEO of Xbox-a sprawling business that includes its namesake console and big titles like "Call of Duty"- this past February following the exit of gaming industry legend Phil Spencer.

While developers and players questioned why a total unknown was taking over one of the most important companies in the videogame industry, Sharma made clear she wants to transform Xbox fast. She told employees she expects profit margins in the double digits this fiscal year and to ultimately reach 1 billion people daily between the company's games, films and other media.

"She's very intense," said Stan Chudnovsky, who was Sharma's boss at Meta. "She works very hard and she expects the people around her to work very hard as well."

Sharma is the second of five children born to parents who immigrated to Racine, Wis., from New Zealand, to join her aunt, whose husband owned a metal fabrication company. Her father worked there while pursuing an engineering degree, instilling a work ethic she applied to everything from martial arts to a job taking out the trash at a park.

She initially hoped to reconcile pressure from her parents to go into medicine with her sports fandom by becoming a team doctor for the Green Bay Packers. But after landing a job at the Racine-based maker of Ziploc bags SC Johnson when she was 17, she decided to study business at the University of Minnesota. By graduation in 2011, she had finished seven internships, researched case studies in Hungary and Poland, and raised $500,000 for a nonprofit she co-founded.

"I had no idea what I wanted to become. I was just more drawn to the things I could do," Sharma said in her Midwestern accent.

She was hired by Microsoft to work in marketing but left after two years to join a startup called Porch that connected homeowners to contractors. She became its chief operating officer while in her 20s, and one of her first big tasks was securing a partnership with home-improvement store Lowe's. "Asha flew redeye after redeye, week after week, and willed that into reality," said Porch co-founder and chief executive Matt Ehrlichman.

After four years at Porch, Sharma joined Meta, where she oversaw products including Messenger and rose rapidly to vice president. "She was probably one of the fastest-promoted people in the history of Facebook," said Chudnovsky.

Then, just a decade after graduating college, Sharma was hired as chief operating officer of Instacart, helping lead the grocery-delivery giant through the pandemic as well as its 2023 IPO. The next year, she returned to Microsoft to oversee the organization building AI tools for internal teams and corporate cloud customers. In late 2025, she sat down in CEO Satya Nadella's office for a meeting and was stunned when he asked her to consider taking over Xbox.

Company leaders liked how Sharma had put herself in the minds of AI developers despite no experience in that world and were confident she could do the same with gamers, Microsoft's chief people officer Amy Coleman said. Sharma was also one of Microsoft's few rising stars with experience running consumer businesses.

Sharma said she concluded that Xbox had excellent game development capabilities, but would benefit from better strategy and execution-so she took the job.

'It wasn't, "Do I want to do this?" but, "Do I believe the theory of the case that I can add unique value?"' she said.

The biggest adjustment has been the very public nature of her new role. Gamers have called Sharma both Xbox's executioner and its savior, pasting her face on images of Jesus Christ on social media. She's even received wedding invitations from strangers in the mail.

Employees and players say Sharma is dramatically different from her predecessor, Spencer, who was known to play videogames during meetings. "Phil made such an effort to be everyone's best friend. It's jarring to have someone perform the role the opposite way," said Chris Plante, host of the videogame fan podcast "Post Games."

In July, Sharma announced that Xbox would eliminate 3,200 jobs, about 20% of its staff, and cut the number of games it makes. Microsoft hasn't yet carried out 1,250 of the layoffs, and, as a result, some employees say anxiety in their ranks remains high. Others say they appreciate how serious Sharma is about stabilizing their business.

"She's uniquely effective at cutting through and communicating clearly, 'Here's what the issues are and here's where the opportunities are,'" said Todd Howard, head of the Microsoft game studio that makes "Fallout" and "Elder Scrolls."

After a decade of acquisitions and expansions by Spencer, Sharma is cutting output and focusing on key franchises she thinks have room to grow, like "Elder Scrolls" and "Halo." She wants to enhance user-created content on "Minecraft," which would position it as a more direct rival to "Roblox," and make Xbox an attractive distribution partner for independent developers. She wants to license more Xbox material for film and TV. And she recently stole one of Sony's top developers, "Metal Gear Solid" creator Hideo Kojima.

She's won praise for removing a widely disliked Xbox AI assistant and making it easier for people who own games on discs to get digital copies. To better understand players, she spends a few hours each month responding to customer support tickets, during which she's learned how complex it can be to fix a single player's problem.

While her obsession with problem-solving works for tech-industry leadership, Sharma made adjustments when she leaves work. After she became a stepmother to a teenager, she and her husband had two children, aged 2 and 1. "I'm finding the beauty in my personal life of having comfort over clarity," she said.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 11, 2026 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)