When Asha Sharma became CEO of Xbox earlier this year, it wasn’t the culmination of a carefully plotted path to the corner office at one of the world’s biggest gaming brands. If anything, it was a reaffirmation of a philosophy she’d followed for years: instead of dreaming of the future, focus on excelling at the job in front of you.
“I never obsessed on what I wanted to be when I grew up,” Sharma said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, on Tuesday.
That mantra traces back to her roots in the Midwest, where she earned a business degree from the University of Minnesota, and launched a park center for at-risk teenagers in Minneapolis. From there, she built a career that zigzagged through marketing at Microsoft, a COO stint at startup Porch Group, product leadership roles at Meta, and a COO post at Instacart before returning to Microsoft in 2024 as president of CoreAI product.
Each move looked less like a master plan and more like someone who kept proving herself until the next door opened.
Xbox has fallen behind Sony and Nintendo—and Sharma is banking on new energy
