This is kind of long, sorry.
I work in tech. I'm officially under the content team, but I'm heavily involved in UX/design, and was hired for my expertise in both areas.
I was assigned a task where the designer, Jim, hadn't done his job very well (it looked good, but the solution was bad and based on a lot of assumptions). I suggested taking a step back, doing some user testing, and looking at the whole journey rather than just a pretty UI bandaid.
Jim was happy with this, my manager was happy, the head of department was happy, the research team was happy.
I did 99% of the work for the research project. The head researcher for our company supplied some of the participants, and made suggestions. My HoD made some suggestions. Jim showed up to some of the interviews and allegedly took notes but never sent them to me when asked. He was silent during interviews, and even when prompted would just say he had nothing to add. I tried to get him more involved but he would just say I was doing great.
In design team planning meetings he cited our research as taking up most of his time, but I honestly don't know how that could be possible because he wasn't doing anything.
I wrote up a research report and again, tried to involve Jim from the start. He never even opened the file. I put his name on the report as a courtesy. I presented the research to the design and content team, who all said they were impressed with my insights and liked my recommendations. Jim did nothing during the presentation. As far as I knew everyone was happy, including Jim who got to take credit for my work.
I set up a meeting between Jim, the product manager Adam, and I to present the research and talk about timelines moving forward. Adam was initially happy with things, although a little miffed I hadn't spoken to him sooner.
We hashed that out. In past jobs it had always been designers' responsibility to keep PMs informed, and I would typically only interact with them at the end of a project to make sure all requirements were being met. I apologized, promised to communicate more in future, we moved on.
Then it came out that Jim had done exactly zero work since the research was finished. He and I had a plan for moving forward where he would take my wireframes and combine them with his designs to make a hi-fi prototype. We had spoken about this two weeks ago, and he hadn't done anything since.
Worse, Adam had been asking him for weeks to test his previous designs separately, as an interim solution until we could move on the solutions I came up with. He hadn't done this, and hadn't even come up with a plan to do this.
I wasn't aware that Adam had been asking Jim to do more research in parallel to mine. I wasn't aware my research wasn't accomplishing Jim's sprint goals. I wasn't even aware Jim had sprint goals related to this task. He had two months to bring this all up, and chose not to.
When questioned, Jim said this had been a joint decision between us and that I had held everything up. He actually turned to me in the meeting and said, “Well are you finally ready to move forward now?” And I was too stunned to even respond.
What followed was a 45 minute angry rant from Adam about how I had wasted 4 months of company time (impressive considering I've only worked there for 2), had put his job on the line, and had held everyone up. I was explicitly told that I needed to now do Jim's research for him, to make up for my mistakes.
When I tried to explain I was completely bulldozed, and by the end of the meeting I was in tears. Adam even said I was lucky he was so nice, because other PMs would be much less forgiving. Rich, considering he'd been shouting for about half an hour at that point.
I don't know how to move on from this. I have to keep working with these people, and I have no idea how to stay professional.
I have never had an issue receiving negative feedback. I consider it a part of the job. But I've never been asked to act as a whipping boy before, and I don't know how to respond.
Any advice would be more than welcome.