If you go back through our retros — and we have — the word "handoff" shows up in almost every single one. Sometimes as a win. More often as the thing that went sideways. Nine times out of ten, when we trace a quietly-bad week back to its root, the root is a handoff that didn't happen, or a handoff that got mailed in.
Handoff is the phase of work between when you stop and someone else starts. It is not a five-minute Slack message. It is not "the tickets are in Linear." It is a real, distinct phase of the project, and if you don't treat it like one, it will kill you.
Handoffs are everywhere
People picture handoff as the big one — client to agency at kickoff. That one matters. But the small ones are where most of the damage happens: PM to developer when a ticket changes hands, IC to IC before a vacation, senior to backup when someone takes a day off. Every one of these is a moment where context lives in one head and has to land in another. Every one of them deserves to be treated as real work, not squeezed into the last ten minutes of a Friday.
Our rules
Always do a check-in right before taking time off — even if there's nothing to hand off. Say the words out loud. It syncs everyone's mental model and forces you to actually check before you say it.
Do the handoff call two days in advance, not the day you leave. If you wait until the day-of, you'll find three things you forgot and someone will be cleaning up after you on a Friday night.
When you hand off a ticket, document where you left it. What's done, what's not, what you were about to try next, what you tried that didn't work. Future-you won't remember any of it; future-someone-else never knew it.
When a senior disappears, the client hears it from us — not from silence. Our retros now include "anyone out soon?" in both directions.
Every client knows who their backup is before they need one. Decide it while things are calm. A named backup who has already been introduced is worth ten times a heroic scramble.
The belief is the thing
Why does this deserve a post instead of a process doc? Because processes don't survive first contact with a busy Tuesday. What survives is the belief that handoff is work — worth the thirty minutes, worth the awkward "pre-vacation sync" on the calendar, worth the five-minute call that ends with "yep, nothing to hand off, cool, bye."
Every smooth week with someone out traces back to someone taking handoff seriously the day before. The difference between a clean week and a quietly-bad one is maybe twenty minutes of deliberate work. Do the twenty minutes.