Article
The Design Handoff Checklist (2026): What Engineers ...
storyflow.so
Quoted on this wiki
Every place a page here uses this source, in the order the words come in it.
Specs are solved. Rules and rationale are not. Spend your handoff effort where the tooling cannot help. “Handoff is a conversation, not a delivery. The moment it becomes a document thrown over a wall, it fails.” Edge cases are the deliverable. Empty, loading, error, overflow, and permissions are where implementations diverge.
When Handoff Actually Happens “Handoff is a sequence of checkpoints, and the earlier ones do most of the work.” While the design is still rough, bring an engineer in. Not for approval, for feasibility. Ten minutes at sketch stage catches the thing that is disproportionately expensive to build, while it is still free to change. This is the single highest-return moment in the whole sequence and it is the one most often skipped, usually because designers do not want to show unfinished work.