I had an end-of-FY review with my manager and while basically all of the feedback is positive, one negative bit of feedback was basically "I'm expecting you to work faster in the future".
Now this feedback seems clear cut, but it is in reference to a previous project that I worked on, which was my first project at this company, which was pretty bumpy due to lacking any sort of estimates or breakdowns for the stories that I worked on, which were often lacking even basic descriptions.
This project was led by a person, who did that for the first time and did not realize/consider the complexities involved in this part of the project. I was quite new to the team/company/product and did not realize the complexities until I was mid-way through. I did actually raise the lack of estimates as an issue at the start of the project and a few times throughout, however, that was largely dismissed/met with conflicting advice.
When my manager brought this up, I basically said that "I would prefer to not use project X as a measure of the speed of my work, since measuring the development of unestimated/unbroken-down stories, which were lacking detail is not a good way to measure somebody's speed of work". I also stated that "while I'm expecting to pick up the speed as I get more familiar with the team, project, product, I will not be taking responsibility for other people's mistakes" and that "this project was a failure of leadership/management".
As you can tell, I was rubbed the wrong way by this feedback and did not agree with that. Besides this, me and my manager and the team are on good terms. The current project, which was actually estimated and broken down is going well. I referred to this as well.
I wonder if I handled it as best as I could and if not, what should have I done differently or how to handle it in the future.
Thanks!
Edit:just to be explicit about this - I've given a lot of feedback to my team and my manager throughout that project about all of the ways in which we could improve our processes, which was received with lukewarm responses.
I was really vocal about the fact that having no estimates and no breakdowns was a problem. I most definitely did not go behind anybody's back and neither did I fingerpoint. There seemed to have been a disconnect between what the upper management thought the project should take and what it actually took and the reason for that in my mind is what I mentioned before - lack of estimates and breakdowns.
So I was just not overly happy having that put on my shoulders during a performance review, as that's the same as me blaming my manager for poor-quality code - it makes little sense. Especially considering how many times I brought this up in our 1:1s before.
