A product leader joining a new organization inherited the product objectives and the backlog. He also inherited the way the team had been organizing and connecting the backlog tasks to the problems they solved.

When the leader who had been managing all this walked him through it, he immediately saw that the connections between objectives and development tasks were made manually. The connecting task was fiddly, so he dropped it. Nothing broke and the changeover was easy. He called it a win and moved on.

What a handover covers

A handover usually covers the steps, who does each one, and what each step produces. With those in hand, a reader can test any step by asking what it is for, and drop it if the purpose is met another way. That test works. The handover showed him what the mechanism was for. It kept all the pieces lined up, and the team did that another way.

What the handover left out

The handover answered what the step was for. It didn’t say what the step prevented: the natural limiter of how many major product objectives could be active at once. The cost of creating a new one was a subtle way to force prioritization.

Without that limiter, the number of product objectives and epics grew. And grew. The team had more conversations about what was important and what could wait until later. Lower priority product objectives meant for later took time in team meetings away from higher priority work.

What a handover needs to include

A handover has to include more than the more obvious steps and outcomes of a process. It also has to say what is prevented when the process works properly. The question for anyone inheriting a process is the same: what does this process prevent when it works?

When the handover answers that, the person inheriting the process can adjust it without losing what it was preventing.

If you are about to hand over a process or take one over, the diagnostic takes about 10 minutes and shows where your team’s work depends on something that may not be obvious about the process: https://amykennedyleadership.com/choose-your-diagnostic/