What is a good way to complain on a retrospective meeting?

Question

Hi I had a following case - a JIra issue with broken flow with regards of To Do / Selected for development / In Progress / Done. The result was that all the tooling around the JIra - boards reports all broken and unusable. The product owners and the team leads wanted to have overview of a certain status so they initiated a review on the statuses. Although I am not a team lead I am the most engaged in Jira developer in my team. Most of the Jira issues are reported by me. My team lead and my product owned asked for feedback and I came prepared in order to address the broken flow I was prepared with 4 points.

At latter meeting the Team Lead and the Product owner have had meeting with the other team leads and POs and after a day they come up with revised flow and non of my 4 points was taken into account. The development flow was as broken as it was before. They came out to slack presenting the new flow seeking for feedback. I gave quite negative feedback and as result of it 3 out of 4 points of my feedback were accepted.

I feel very unhappy with my TL and my PO because they did not deliver my message and I had to contact a differnt TL in order to get it done.

On monday I have a retrospective meeting and I feel the need to complain and show my dissatisfaction with the situation. How can I do it in such way to not alienate the rest of the team. Should I take it personaly with the PO and TL or can I complain in a good way during the retrospective ?

Here is the exact flow of events:

1. PO triggers change Of flow to add some statuser addressing functional resources.
2. Asks the team to review the flow and what we may need
3. They recieve feedback regarding the development flow
4. They go to all TL meeting
5. New flow is accepted no points from the feedback talen
6. No Reverse feedback
7. The flow is posted to All slack channel
8. I critisize publicly adding diagrams
9. Have a talk with 2 TL from different teams
10. 3 out Of 4 points were accepted from my feedback
11. I am left thinking they were not aware Of my feedback
12. I am pissed

Answer 1

Don't complain in a retrospective, and certainly not about specific people. It can be cathartic, but it's not going to change anything and it's not going to endear you to anyone. Save that for outside of work with your friends and/or spouse.

Instead, focus on things you'd like to improve in the future.

If you feel that the new workflow didn't address the problems inherent in the old one, then maybe suggest that in the future when redesigning processes, the people closest to the problems should be involved in coming up with the new one.

Or perhaps the problems could have been avoided if there had been more opportunities for feedback during the design of the new process instead of right at the end.

These are just examples, you'll have to work out for yourself what you think could improve things in the future, but my point is that a retrospective meeting can only be useful if there are action items at the end for things that are going to be different from now on. Otherwise it's just a moan fest that achieves nothing except to reduce everyone's morale.

Telling people what a bad job you think they did isn't going to create those actions, even though it might seem satisfying.

Answer 2

It didn't go like I assumed, it really went wrong.

The main action will be asking for feedback:

1. You want feedback about how/why each points were taken/dismissed with all TLs/POs meeting. (Actions 2 or 3 from previous answer)
2. You want them to ask for feedback (at the very least from people who made points but were not part of the meeting). Maybe each TL/PO could ask their team for feedback.

What's to gain from this in the future is

1. Less frustration/anger from people helping and keeping them involved.
2. Less frustration/anger from the TLs/POs: You going public about what's wrong may have been an issue for some TLs/POs.
3. Efficiency ? Better solution ? ...

Always frame it about the gain in the future.
If you can do that, then I think it's worth to bring it up during the retrospective. Because you will have found something to improve the situation. If you think it's not enough, your team will help.

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Previous answer based on wrong idea of how things went:
I'm not sure things went that bad maybe just a misunderstandig ?

• You had some points
• TLs/POs chose a solution
• TLs/POs asked for feedback
• You gave feedback
• They took it into account

But you could frame it like "in this case it went OK but it could have gone wrong and there are things to improve":

Regarding the issue with Jira, everything went well but... I though that my points had already been dismissed when TLs/POs asked for feedback.

I did bring it up again because I felt frustrated, but someone else may not have done the same.

If I didn't give any feedback, the workflow would have changed without really solving the issue.

Then there are some actions available.

Action 1:
Making explicit that when TLs/POs are asking for feedback people should bring up any points even if they think that their points were already taken into account because it may not be the case.

Action 2:
The TL/PO share the points of the member in the discussion.
There should be a feedback from the TL/PO on why it was dismissed/changed.
Then back to action 1: TL/PO may not have been able to "sell it well" (or misunderstood something or whatever may happen)

Action 3:
Instead of action 2, the member participate in the discussion.
Then back to action 1: Someone else may have some points that didn't make it to the discussion.