New Xbox CEO replaces 24-year Microsoft employees with former CoreAI, Meta, Instacart execs to "evolve how we work"

New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is initiating a leadership overhaul and hiring many of her past colleagues at Instacart, Meta, and Microsoft's CoreAI product as quarterly Xbox hardware sales collapse another 33%.

CNBC reports on a memo shared internally at Xbox on May 5 announcing the changes. Sharma tells staff, "We need to evolve how we work and how we are organized across our platform," according to CNBC. As part of this goal, 24-year Microsoft veterans Kevin Gammill and Roanne Sones will leave their current positions.

Gammill is currently corporate vice president of Microsoft's gaming ecosystem organization, and he's assisted with Xbox development in some capacity since 2010. He originally joined Microsoft as a development lead in 1994, according to his LinkedIn, then left the company in 1999 and returned as director of development in 2007. Sones, based on her LinkedIn history, has instead consistently served as a Microsoft corporate vice president since 2002, and she's overseen Xbox's devices and ecosystem from that standpoint since 2023. After taking a leave of absence, she will return to Xbox as an advisor.

Sharma tells employees, "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." The CEO says her new hires represent "consumer and technical expertise we do not yet have."

One of these hires is Jared Palmer, former vice president of Microsoft's CoreAI product and senior vice president of its GitHub platform, who will join Xbox as vice president of engineering. He writes – opaquely – in an announcement on Twitter, "I'll be focused on building world-class tools, services, and experiences for developers and players across the Xbox ecosystem."

Ex-Instacart senior director of product growth David Schloss will also now manage Xbox's subscriptions and Cloud product, as he confirms in his just-updated LinkedIn identifying himself as "Leadership at Xbox."

Palmer, Schloss, and Sharma's three other new hires – Jonathan McKay, Tim Allen, and Evan Chaki – all previously worked with Sharma during her time at either CoreAI, Instacart, or Meta in the past. Some held jobs at multiple of those companies. McKay, for example, spent time at both Meta and CoreAI; he started his career as a US diplomat stationed in Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh, and has also worked at OpenAI on ChatGPT.

Sharma adds in her memo, reported by The Verge, "Our goal with this [leadership] change is simple: build a platform that is affordable, personal, and open by staying close to the work and the people we serve."

Sharma does seem to have been actively pursuing these principles within Xbox since her surprise appointment to CEO in February. She's recently admitted to employees that Xbox Game Pass is "too expensive" amid her publicly re-renaming Microsoft Gaming to Xbox, demonstrating an obvious desire to turn back the clock as Xbox sales get sadder.

Xbox Game Pass gets "grim prognosis" from former PlayStation CEO, new Xbox head Asha Sharma tells him they should "chat sometime."