| I think you need to be honest. Do a 'shit sandwich': complement, air grievances, complement again. ex.` Hey, I think you scoring our first customer is probably the most important thing either of us has done, and I'm really excited about sales starting to roll in. I know that I'm not very good at that kind of thing, and so I should focus on the codebase. Because you're much more effective at it than me, I wonder if you should allocate a higher proportion of your time into sales and business development. As a two-person company, we need to be as smart as possible with our most limited resource: time. I appreciate that you're making an effort to contribute to our codebase, but I have a few small concerns: - Your commits have introduced a number of bugs. It takes me twice+ as long to fix a bug you wrote than one I did because I need to understand what you did. I think we both agree that we want to make sure that X and Y features are done as soon as possible, so please be very cautious about committing any code that could introduce bugs that will block progress. Once we get better unit testing, it will be easier for you to contribute code more safely, so lets think about improving testing after X and Y. - It was disappointing that we didn't land Z customer because of an internal communication failure on what features had been implemented. I think we need some documentation about what the product is capable of. If you could take this on, that'd be awesome. I'll try to do better at communicating what I've implemented with changelists or 'new feature' emails. - I know you like to show customers the codebase when walking them through the product. I'm worried this is too technical, and perhaps documentation or a pared down marketing 'fact-sheet', or 'user stories', or something like that could be a more effective visual aid for these meetings. I really appreciate your spirit and effort in everything we've built together. Your code has been helpful, but we have SO much to do that isn't purely code that I think we should 'divide and conquer' for the next few months: I'll try to finish X and Y features, and you get another couple of customers. I think if we accomplish that, our company would be in a really strong position. What do you think?` Make it clear that his bugs are introducing operational costs, and that you want to mitigate that cost. Don't use the 'stick' to keep him away from the code, but rather dangle 'carrots' in all of the other parts of the business that need work. |