Most teams don’t lose work inside a step. They lose it between steps. A handoff is the point where work moves to a new owner: person to person inside a phase, across functions like sales to design, or out to a client or vendor (the hardest kind, since someone has to own the waiting). An AI finishing a draft and waiting on your approval is a handoff too; a judgment call needs a human in the loop.
A relay race makes the point. Speed alone doesn’t win it. The race falls apart at the baton pass, and a fast first runner who drops the baton still costs the team. A real handoff has three parts: the baton (the output), the runner (who owns the next step), and the lane (the rules for what “ready” means).
Why you care
Handoffs are where messy work hides: vague input means the next person rebuilds what happened, and an unclear owner means everyone assumes someone else has it. When we map a workflow, handoffs become milestones showing where agents can run in parallel and where a human reviews. Delegation routing covers who gets the task, with what context, at what moment, and with what definition of done.