The handoff trail: what to record and when
Handoffs fail when the outgoing person is unavailable and the incoming one has no trail. Here is what to write down as you go.
Avery Lindqvist
Product strategy
Nobody writes handoff documentation at the moment it would be most useful — during the project. It gets written, if at all, in the frantic week before someone leaves, which is exactly when context is hardest to recall and easiest to get wrong.
Record as you go
The cheapest handoff is the one that never needs writing. If every decision, version, and milestone is already timestamped in the workspace, a handoff is a change of permission, not a week of interviews.
What actually matters
A new person does not need the whole history. They need four things: what was promised, what was decided, what is currently open, and who to ask about what. Anything beyond that is archive, and archives can be searched later.
- Client promises and constraints, in writing
- Decisions with dates and the reasoning that survived
- Open threads and their current owners
- Names: who approves what, and who is merely interested
The ten-minute test
After a handoff, ask the incoming person to summarise the project from the workspace alone. If they can do it in ten minutes, the trail worked. If they need a call, something was left in a private channel.
Written by
Avery Lindqvist
Product strategy