Xbox CEO Asha Sharma Is Experiencing Xbox Like a Player

Asha Sharma has spent much of her first year as Xbox CEO making some difficult decisions. Now, it appears she's also getting a much closer look at what those decisions mean for players.

According to a new profile of Sharma from The Wall Street Journal, the Xbox boss spends a few hours each month responding to customer support tickets herself. The bigger picture is: she wants to understand what Xbox players actually experience when something goes wrong.

The WSJ says Sharma has learned through these interactions “how complex it can be to fix a single player's problem.” That’s a surprisingly hands-on approach for the head of a business as large as Xbox. It's also one of the more interesting details to come out of the WSJ profile, particularly because Sharma's leadership so far has been heavily focused on changing how Xbox operates.

Asha Sharma wants to understand Xbox from the player's side

Sharma arrived at the top of Xbox leadership role without a traditional videogame-industry background. Since taking over, she’s overseen a major restructuring of the business, including thousands of job cuts, changes to Xbox’s studio strategy and a renewed focus on the company's core franchises.

She's also been unusually direct about why those changes are happening. Earlier this year, Sharma and Xbox executive Matt Booty told employees that the company needed to confront some uncomfortable realities as part of its reset. The message was eventually made public, with Sharma arguing that Xbox couldn't “succeed by hiding hard truths” or by continuing to do things the same way.

That thinking has become one of the defining characteristics of her leadership. In the WSJ profile, Sharma describes her management philosophy with a simple phrase: “Clarity is kindness.”