I am working for a project in a team of 5 people. The team comprises of 3 people from my company and 2 freelancers.
I have the role of the tech lead / architect of the team, though I have less experience both in general and in this project than one of the freelancers. He is the type of person that has an opinion about everything, and spends a lot of his time in meetings since he wants to know and have an opinion on all topics.
I, together with 2 people outside this immediate team, are currently running some performance tests on our system.
This freelancer asked me yesterday if he can see the "report". I replied, that the report isn't available yet, and will be provided once we are done with the tests. His reply to this was
"No, I need the report now, this is where the conditions are documented and the scenarios are listed. The results are only useful when the starting conditions are known".
A couple of things:
I interpreted "report", as the documentation of the results, not the starting conditions and scenarios. It feels paternalistic to be told that it makes sense to have the starting conditions documented.
I dislike "No, I need the report now" for multiple reasons. First of all I dislike the tone, since I don't think that it's his role to request that. Second, 3 people are currently involved in these tests, and we don't need him poking his nose and checking the results / telling us what to do.
I have a bit of an ego / emotional reaction to that that I want to keep in check ("who is he to request things of me?").
But beyond that I think that that's not helpful for the team. His role isn't to try and get involved into everything and check up whether we are doing a good job or not.
Situations like this keep happening, so I want to find a good way to communicate this, without being whiny or complain about it.
How do I handle this? Is this an issue in your eyes or should I just let him do whatever he wants?
Edit to answer a question: He doesn't need this information, since he isn't working on the performance tests. He just tends to want to criticise and have an opinion about everything. Regarding my role: we work in a more modern environment, so I don't do division and assignment of tasks, I am responsible for the end result and have the final say in some matters.