I had to tell someone their work wasn't right this week, and I did a genuinely terrible job of it.
Not cruel — the opposite. I was so busy padding it that I don't think the actual message ever landed. I opened with what I liked. Then a lot of "maybe" and "I wonder if" and "this is just my take." By the end I'd said the sentence I meant exactly once, quietly, buried in the middle, wrapped in enough qualifiers that a reasonable person could have walked away thinking I was mostly happy.
They walked away thinking I was mostly happy. They came back two days later having built more of the thing I'd been trying to say wasn't working.
That one's on me. Entirely.
The problem is that the founders here have a shorthand — we've been blunt with each other for a year and nobody flinches. But someone newer doesn't have that yet. They don't know that "hmm, interesting" from me means "I have concerns," or that a long pause means I'm doing arithmetic. So all the softening I did out of kindness just made the signal impossible to read. I optimised for the temperature of the room and lost the content entirely.
And there's a power thing underneath it I hadn't thought about. When you're the person who commissioned the work, your vague comment isn't heard as vague — it's scanned for hidden meaning. The mildness that feels considerate from where I'm sitting can read as either "everything's fine" or "he hates it and won't say," depending on the day someone's having. Neither is what I meant.
So I redid it. Sat down, said the actual thing in the first sentence, gave the reason, then talked about what would fix it. It took ninety seconds and it was mildly uncomfortable and it was miles kinder than the twenty gentle minutes I'd wasted earlier. Clarity is the kind bit. The waffle only ever protects me.
What I'm slowly getting is that a studio's feedback culture isn't a nice-to-have you install later when there are enough people to need one. It starts now, at this size, with the habits we're accidentally forming. If we teach ourselves that hard conversations get softened into mush, that's what we'll be at twenty people, except by then it'll be load-bearing.
Say it early. Say it plainly. Then help fix it.
Still learning the first two.
— Thiago & the Pixel Sprout team
Posted by Thiago Moreira · August 20, 2026
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