GoKawiilAsha Sharma, CEO of Xbox at Microsoft, speaks to employees at an Xbox town hall in Redmond, Washington, on Feb. 24, 2026.
Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma told employees in a Tuesday memo that she's appointing new leaders, as the software company looks to return its video game unit to growth.
Sharma moved to Xbox in February as gaming chief Phil Spencer announced his retirement. She came to Microsoft in 2024 after executive stints at Meta and Instacart , becoming president of product in the CoreAI engineering group that works on GitHub Copilot, Visual Studio Code and other developer tools.
"We need to evolve how we work and how we are organized across our platform," Sharma wrote in a memo viewed by CNBC. "Right now, it is too hard to ship impact quickly. We spend too much time inward instead of with the community, and we lack the depth we need in some of the fundamentals."
Last week, Microsoft reported its fourth gaming revenue decline in the past six quarters. Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, said the company is trying to win back fans of Xbox, the Bing search engine and other consumer assets.
The Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 and Sony PlayStation 5 outsold Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Series S consoles in the first quarter, according to data from video game website VGChartz. In April, Sharma touted price cuts for Game Pass subscriptions that give gamers access to hundreds of titles.
Xbox is "bringing in new leaders with consumer and technical expertise we do not yet have," she wrote in the memo.
Four of those leaders are coming from the CoreAI group, overlapping with Sharma.