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Helen Chiang
“This is not how I ever imagined my story here would end. And it is not the whole story.”
Longtime Microsoft executive Helen Chiang was made Xbox’s first-ever chief operating officer as part of the ‘reset’ in July, a role that gave her “end-to-end P&L responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services.” Then, just three months later and with virtually no fanfare, she was gone, amidst an anonymous claim that she was “terminated for policy violations.”
Saying it was important “to set the record straight,” Chiang has now formally denied that claim in a lengthy LinkedIn post, saying she did not:
- “Leak confidential company information to the press”
- “Leave Xbox to join a competitor”
- “Engage in discrimination, bullying, harassment, insider trading, embezzlement, or other fraudulent activity”
- “Leave because I was passed over for a bigger role”
The record-straightening did not get into why Chiang did leave Xbox, although she seemed to imply that it was not an amicable departure: “I believe in fairness, accountability, and holding ourselves to the standards we expect of others. Those standards only mean something when they’re applied consistently. I have serious concerns about how they were applied in my case, and I believe those concerns deserve to be taken seriously.”
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The sudden split seemed doubly strange because prior to taking the COO job at Xbox, Chiang spent more than 20 years at Microsoft, nearly all of it with the Xbox division—rising from Xbox platform business manager in 2007 to corporate vice president of the Minecraft franchise in 2020, a position she held for more than six years. The memo announcing Chiang’s departure was also notably restrained: “Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today,” Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote. “I’m grateful for her years of service and wish her well.”
“I share this because I don’t want my departure reduced to an inaccurate story about incompetence, ambition for the next big job, or a Nelson-level scandal. My story is about staying true to your core values, especially when it is hard. That’s the legacy I hope to leave behind,” Chiang wrote in her message.
“This is not how I ever imagined my story here would end. And it is not the whole story.”
I’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment on Chiang’s message and will update if I receive a reply.
