Xbox’s new Chief of Staff just reunited with Asha Sharma — but who exactly is Craig Cincotta?

Amid the departure of Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, there's new leadership at Xbox. Craig Cincotta is not an unfamiliar name within Microsoft. He joined the company in 2006, during what many consider Xbox’s golden era, when the Xbox 360 was a dominant force in the market.

At the time, however, he was not working on Xbox. He began under the Windows division as a PR manager before moving over to Xbox in 2010 as Director of Communications. In 2013, he stepped into the role of Director of Sports Marketing, which is a position I did not even realise existed until researching today.

After seven years at Microsoft, Cincotta left in 2013 to join Porch. He would not return to Microsoft until 2016, where he has remained ever since, initially working on HoloLens before transitioning to Azure, and then cloud & AI.

Now, with Cincotta stepping into the role of Chief of Staff for Xbox, the bigger question becomes what exactly that means. While we can only speculate on the specifics of his role, it is worth taking a closer look at the career that led him here.

Who is Craig Cincotta?

For those unfamiliar with the role, a Chief of Staff works directly alongside the CEO. It is not typically a public-facing position, but it is one of the closest roles to executive leadership.

Cincotta will be responsible for aligning departments around shared goals, supporting leadership teams, and helping structure key decisions. A Chief of Staff also tracks priorities and progress across divisions, ensuring initiatives stay on course and leadership remains coordinated. All in all, making it a rather important role within Xbox.

Interestingly, Cincotta and Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Xbox, do share professional history.

Sharma worked at Porch as COO between 2013 and 2017. During that same period, Cincotta served as Senior Vice President and Head of Communications from 2013 to 2016. Their roles overlapped for roughly two and a half years, meaning they were part of the same senior leadership team.

While there is no public breakdown of how closely they worked, communications and operations typically align closely in a growing company. That makes it reasonable to assume they had regular executive interaction during their time at Porch.

Directly before stepping into his new role as Chief of Staff at Xbox, Cincotta served as General Manager, Communications for Cloud and AI at Microsoft for three and a half years.

Sharma’s previous role was President of CoreAI Product at Microsoft, a major engineering organization focused on AI models, developer tools, and Azure infrastructure. So not the scary AI stuff, we’ve all come to loathe. Anyway, given the overlap in Cloud and AI leadership, it is possible their paths crossed again internally at Microsoft, though the extent of that interaction is not publicly detailed.

Looking further back, Cincotta joined Microsoft in 2006 during the Xbox 360 era, although he initially worked within Windows communications. He moved to Xbox in 2010 as Director of Communications and remained there until 2013.

That timeline places him at Xbox during the lead-up to the Xbox One launch. However, his background sits firmly in communications and marketing leadership, not hardware strategy or platform policy.

There’s very little reason that would directly tie him to the controversial DRM or TV TV TV focused messaging that shaped the early Xbox One narrative and gave the victory to Sony’s PlayStation 4, something that’s still felt across the industry today.

For now, that is likely all most people need to know. I wish Cincotta the best in his new role, as well as Sharma as she steps into leadership.

Xbox still has a lot to prove. As much as I will miss Phil and Sarah, the division is clearly in need of fresh momentum. All we can hope is that this leadership shift brings exactly that.

Are you excited about the future of Xbox and the changes to leadership?

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