The design leader's guide to redefining handoff

How to break down silos and align incentives across design and development

Handoff has become a shorthand for the baton pass between product design and development teams. Today, the challenge isn’t just about how to improve handoff—it’s about reimagining how designers and developers work together. Smooth design-development collaboration can not only increase speed to market, but also result in truly differentiated product experiences. So why is it often hard to bridge the gap between them? Even when they share the same north star of shipping exceptional user experiences, their daily realities can feel worlds apart.

In our guide, we distill insights from leading teams and share learnings at every altitude—from principles to processes. Here's what you'll learn:

• A new framework for aligning designers and developers
• Philosophies from leading teams, like GitHub’s call for engineers to “shift left,” and Duolingo’s “definition of done”
• How reframing how you talk about handoff impacts cross-functional team collaboration
• How to identify the minimum viable process you need for your team