You’ve seen the name on board seats at Home Depot and Coupang. You might have caught her on stage at Microsoft Ignite, talking about "invisible engines" and agentic AI. But if you think Asha Sharma leadership counsel is just another corporate buzzword or a typical executive coaching package, you’re missing the actual story.
Most people look at a resume like hers—Microsoft, Instacart, Meta, Porch—and see a ladder. I see a laboratory.
Asha Sharma doesn't just manage teams; she re-engineers how human beings work alongside machines. When people search for her leadership counsel, they aren't looking for a "how-to" on making spreadsheets. They are looking for the blueprint she used to take Instacart through an IPO while maintaining profitability in a brutal grocery market. Honestly, it’s about how she navigates the "death of the org chart," a concept she’s been vocal about as we move into 2026.
The "Loop Not the Lane" Philosophy
One of the most striking things about how Asha Sharma views leadership is her rejection of the traditional "swim lane." In the old world, you stayed in your lane. Marketing did marketing. Product did product.
Sharma’s leadership counsel focuses on the loop.
✨ Don't miss: Les Wexner Net Worth: What the Billions Really Look Like in 2026
Basically, she argues that in an AI-driven era, hierarchies are becoming "task networks." If you’re a leader today, your job isn't to defend your department's territory. It’s to ensure the feedback loop between the customer, the data, and the product is as tight as humanly possible.
- The Problem: Rigid org charts create silos that kill speed.
- The Sharma Solution: Moving from "product as artifact" to "product as organism."
She’s often mentioned that what she learned from Satya Nadella at Microsoft was the power of optimism as a functional tool. It’s not just "feeling good." It’s about creating a culture where people feel safe enough to experiment with "agentic" workflows—where AI agents might actually outnumber human employees in certain tasks.
Why Instacart Was a Turning Point
People often ask what really happened during her tenure as COO at Instacart. It was a whirlwind.
When she joined, the world was still reeling from pandemic-era shifts. She had full P&L responsibility for a $30 billion+ operation. Think about that for a second. That’s not just managing people; it’s managing a massive, living ecosystem of shoppers, retailers, and customers.
🔗 Read more: Left House LLC Austin: Why This Design-Forward Firm Keeps Popping Up
Her counsel to other leaders often stems from this period. She emphasizes "dirty hand" culture. It’s a term she brought over from her early days at Porch. You don’t just look at the dashboard; you get in the trenches. If the delivery app is lagging for a shopper in Des Moines, the COO needs to know why it feels that way, not just what the data says.
Practical Insights from the Asha Sharma Playbook
If you’re trying to apply Asha Sharma leadership counsel to your own career or company, you have to start with how you plan. She’s a big advocate for "seasons" planning.
Forget the five-year plan. In the current landscape, five years is a century.
Instead, she suggests breaking the year into seasons that allow for rapid pivoting. This is how Microsoft’s AI Platform operates under her guidance. You build for the season you’re in, while keeping the "invisible engine"—the core infrastructure—strong enough to handle whatever the next season throws at you.
💡 You might also like: Joann Fabrics New Hartford: What Most People Get Wrong
Tactical Shifts for 2026
- Stop hiring for lanes. Look for "full-stack builders" who understand the intersection of code, design, and business logic.
- Invest in "Post-Training." Sharma has predicted that post-training (fine-tuning and RLHF) will soon see more investment than the initial pre-training of models. Leaders need to know how to build their own "AI moat."
- The "Work Chart" vs. the "Org Chart." Map out how work actually gets done, not who reports to whom. You’ll usually find the two look nothing alike.
The Boardroom Perspective: Beyond the C-Suite
Her election to the Home Depot board in 2025 wasn't just a diversity win or a tech-exec-of-the-month play. Home Depot is obsessed with "interconnected retail." They want the physical and digital worlds to bleed into each other seamlessly.
Sharma’s counsel here is invaluable because she understands the "unstructured data" of a physical store. She knows how to take the chaos of a lumber aisle and turn it into a streamlined digital experience.
It's the same reason Coupang brought her on. When you're dealing with logistics at that scale, leadership isn't about giving orders. It's about designing systems that can't fail.
Actionable Next Steps for Leaders
If you want to lead like Asha Sharma, you can't be afraid of the "invisible engine."
- Audit your feedback loops. Is there a delay between a customer complaint and a product change? If it's more than a few days, your "loop" is broken.
- Adopt "Seasons" Planning. Take your Q3 goals and treat them as a standalone "season" with its own specific environment and constraints.
- Evaluate your "Agentic" Readiness. Ask your team: "If we had 100 AI agents to do the grunt work, what would we actually build?"
The reality of Asha Sharma leadership counsel is that it requires a high degree of intellectual honesty. You have to admit when your old ways of organizing are dead. It’s kinda scary, honestly. But as she demonstrated at Meta and Instacart, the leaders who embrace the "organism" over the "artifact" are the ones who stay relevant.