Ending design handoff: this is our fight

If we, as designers, don’t fight to end the design handoff sh** show, then who will?

Project handoff is one of the most inefficient and painful steps in software development.

Designers and developers both hate it. Handoff leads to a false antagonism between design and development teams. Designers fight to “be in the room”, but design handoff is a door we can’t walk through. While for developers, front-loading design means they are always building solutions they had no say in and are left holding the product hot potato.

Furthermore, unnecessary rework of both design and code is nearly guaranteed, and the monetary costs are high. The Dev Ops Research & Assessment Group calculates that for a medium-sized business at a medium level of technical performance, upwards of 37.8M is lost to unnecessary rework each year.

Forrester Research quantified how much cheaper it is to find and fix problems earlier in the build process, with costs 30 times higher if fixes happen after work ships.

“Costs are 30 times higher when rework happens after work ships.” —Forrester Research

We have all felt the pain of handoff. Despite that, it is so ubiquitous we assume it is an inevitable part of product builds; that it is just how designers and developers work with each other. It is NOT inevitable, and there are simple, common-sense alternatives.

The solution is simple. But that doesn’t make it easy.

Process transformation is never easy. But it is worth it. One solution I have been working on is the No Handoff method: a collection of common sense and known (but often ignored) techniques and tools that can get rid of project handoff altogether.

At the heart of this new way of building products is functional prototyping: product and engineering working on the actual product itself, in iterative stages.

The working prototype is the living spec of the project and a shared language for the team. No more translation is needed because everyone understands a prototype.