Deborah Kirkham and the job hidden inside a rejection

Deborah Kirkham turned down a company’s bid for work. Then its chief executive called to ask why. This is the point in a business story where everyone might be expected to reach for a diplomatic euphemism. Kirkham explained the problems. The company responded by offering her a job running its interactive entertainment division. A rejected proposal had become a rather effective recruitment exercise.

She moved from the publishing side of games into product services in 2010. The move put her on the other side of a familiar problem. She had been the customer deciding whether a supplier could deliver. Now she would be responsible for making sure it could. She had already conducted the interview, although nobody had told her.

Today she leads Side, the games services business formerly known as PTW, and serves on the board of its parent, Pole To Win Holdings. Her work sits among the less conspicuous parts of game production: the testing, language work, audio, art and development support that help other companies’ creations reach players. Her own story is about learning to make that work visible.

A literature degree, followed by the production floor

Kirkham studied Russian literature, completing a bachelor’s degree at the University of California, San Diego in 1994. It is an appealing detail for a leader whose business helps stories travel, although she has resisted presenting the degree as an explanation for everything that followed. Careers are allowed to contain more than one interest. Literature does not have to account for the entire profit and loss statement.

Her professional record places her at LucasArts in February 2008 and Bandai Namco Games America in May 2009. She held production services and operations leadership roles at those businesses. In July 2010 she became president of interactive entertainment at e4e. After the business entered the Pole To Win group, she became COO of PTW America in October 2012, then COO of PTW International Holdings in January 2016.

The sequence matters. She came to the chief executive’s chair through the practical business of getting work delivered. Before there was a mandate to explain the company to the world, there were publishers’ requirements, production services and operating responsibilities. The customer’s awkward question had become her daily occupation.

The promotion that changed the direction of her attention

Her appointment as CEO took effect in January 2019. Teppei Tachibana moved from that role to chairman, and Kirkham joined the parent company’s board in April. This was an internal succession after years of working together, rather than an outsider arriving with a suitcase of new slogans.

The scale of the operation had changed considerably. When she joined e4e, the business operated in three countries with fewer than 500 employees. By the announcement of her CEO appointment, the international company had more than 1,800 people in 16 offices across 10 countries. Those are historical snapshots of a growing organization, not its current headcount.

Kirkham had also led a corporate restructuring in July 2018 intended to give regional sites more commercial and operational autonomy. Growth required decisions to travel in more than one direction. A company spread across countries cannot wait for every answer to arrive from a single desk.

Even with that experience, becoming CEO surprised her. “I was actually surprised at how different it was,” she said in 2019. Running the operation had directed her attention inward. The new job demanded strategy, vision and a more public account of what the business did. Being competent at the work and being known for the work were now separate items on the agenda.

The window test

Kirkham’s descriptions of leadership can be quite physical. In 2019 she recalled turning down prospective offices in Taiwan because the ceilings were too low or the location unsuitable. A layout that gave the windows to enclosed offices while placing employees in the middle was another reason to leave. “I walk right back out,” she said.

It is a useful little test of an otherwise abstract principle. An organization can describe itself as unhierarchical in a hundred presentations. The floor plan offers a quicker opinion. Daylight is an unusually candid management consultant.

She has also described a preference for giving leaders autonomy, accepting that responsibility includes the possibility of failure. Her account of delegation includes asking what support a team needs. The task is handed over, but the executive remains available. That approach requires some restraint from a leader who has spent years knowing how the operation works.

The thought partner beside the calendar

One relationship gives that idea a human scale. In 2019, Kaley Hurst was Kirkham’s executive business partner. Hurst’s role had begun with the logistics of a demanding travel schedule and developed into a closer strategic collaboration as Kirkham’s responsibilities expanded.

Working in the same room helped. Kirkham described Hurst as part of the executive team with a seat at the table. A weekly walk through the calendar included context, preparation and decisions about where the chief executive’s attention should go. The calendar had become more than a list of appointments; it was a way of sharing the thinking behind them.

“You can’t automate a thought partner,” Kirkham said. It is a compact statement about the difference between completing tasks and understanding a person’s work. Someone can arrange the meeting. Someone who understands the business can question whether that meeting belongs in the week at all.

Hurst’s subsequent career provides a continuation to the story. She was promoted to chief revenue officer in 2024. In May 2026, Side named her chief marketing officer as part of a revised leadership structure. The colleague once helping a CEO organize her attention was now responsible for strengthening the company’s marketing and integrated communications.

“You can’t automate a thought partner.”

Deborah Kirkham · 2019

A shorter name for a complicated company

On March 3, 2025, PTW announced that it would become Side. The change brought PTW, the audio brand SIDE, 1518 Studios and Ghostpunch Games under one identity. Each name carried a history; together, they could also give a prospective customer quite a lot of explaining to do.

Kirkham framed the change as recognition that employees had already been operating as one team. For a services business, the practical promise is that a client can understand how the pieces work together. Art, codevelopment, audio, localization, quality assurance and player support are different disciplines, but a game’s production schedule does not politely observe the boundaries between their departments.

The company described more than 40 studios in 15 countries at the time of the announcement. That figure belongs to March 2025. The more revealing development is the breadth of the offering: a leader who arrived to run an interactive entertainment division was now explaining a collection of production businesses with a single name.

Building the machinery behind that growth also meant appointments less likely to appear on a game’s box. In January 2025, David Dorans joined as CFO, reporting to Kirkham, with a remit covering global finance, operating efficiencies and support for expansion. The language is sober. It should be. A new name can fit on a sign; an international business still needs financial discipline behind it.

Where the next jobs might be

Expansion has continued across different markets. In July 2025, Side signed a memorandum of understanding with Savvy Games Group and announced plans for a Riyadh studio focused on codevelopment for developers in the Middle East and North Africa. The announcement set out an ambition and a timetable. It was a statement about where Kirkham saw demand for production partners.

In January 2026, the company opened larger premises in Taipei and announced plans to create at least 75 jobs. The team had completed more than 100 projects in 2025, and approximately a tenth of its full-time staff had been promoted. Kirkham linked the expansion to local talent and the introduction of AI solutions into the company’s services.

Her advice to people starting out in games is broader than the usual instruction to learn to code. In a 2023 post, she encouraged prospective recruits to examine their existing skills and interests, then consider the many teams and companies involved in making a game. Art and design offer routes in; so do businesses working alongside the publisher whose name a player recognizes.

There is a personal logic to that advice. Her own decisive move came through a supplier rather than a studio’s front door. A career in games can take place among companies a player has never thought to look up. Searching only for a familiar logo may produce a very incomplete map.

Getting the hidden work into the room

Recognition has followed. At the 2025 TIGA Games Industry Awards, Kirkham received the Outstanding Leadership award, while Side won Best Co-Development Partner. The pairing gives an individual honor a useful context: the business is judged on work it does with other people.

By June 2026, she was making a more public argument for those collaborators. After Side sponsored Westminster Games Week, Kirkham called for greater visibility for external development and for more of its entry-level work to return to the UK. QA, localization and localization QA, she argued, can provide skilled careers and a route toward future development roles.

She offered concrete examples of work that is easy to overlook. Side’s London studio had employed more than 800 actors the previous year, paying almost £4 million in fees. Its localization operation and freelance linguists had translated more than 50 million words across 87 language pairs. Those figures turn an anonymous service into people speaking, writing and being paid. They also explain why she wants policymakers to look beyond the names on the packaging.

Technology is part of the next chapter. In August 2026, Side signed a binding memorandum of understanding with Danish developer Modl.ai for an initial six-month effort involving product development and commercial pilots in AI-assisted game testing. The proposed workflow gives QA engineers tools to direct agents and review recorded tests. Results were to be shared in 2027; the pilot was still a pilot.

The question that first changed Kirkham’s career was why a supplier had failed to win. Her present work asks a larger group of people to examine the suppliers themselves: what they make possible, who they employ and what they need to deliver. It is a long conversation to grow from one unsuccessful bid. The company that phoned to ask for feedback received rather more than it expected.