An Audience With… Helen Chiang

Microsoft’s head of Minecraft on being responsible for a global phenomenon

- Jen Simpkins

As head of Minecraft, Helen Chiang must wear many hats. Sometimes, she’s working closely with Microsoft’s technology teams, helping to decide how best the company’s latest innovations can develop Minecraft into a more advanced and inclusive experience; other times, she’s getting to know Minecraft’s huge community of players, talking to them to discover what they want most out of their experience with the game. Now, she’s really out in the field with Minecraft Earth, one of the guiding figures helping both Microsoft and Mojang to understand the real value of their ambitious project, and to figure out how Earth really might be used to build a better world for its players.

You’re head of Minecraft, which is perhaps the coolest job title in videogames. What does your role actually involve?

It definitely makes me a hit at the classroom survey at my daughter’s school! It’s actually really varied from day to day, as you can imagine. I spend a lot of time internally at the studio thinking about where we want to take the franchise, checking on how we’re executing against our plans. Now that Mojang is integrated into Microsoft, I spend a lot of my time with other parts of Microsoft: since the game is built upon Microsoft technologies with Azure and mixed-reality spatial anchors, I spend time with other parts of the company to see where there are synergies. And then I spend as much time as I can out with our community, our players and our partners. That’s the part where I’m really excited: you really get to see the energy and the impact of everything that we do. Every day looks a little bit different.

How does your current role differ from the positions you’ve held in the past?