Ask a leadership team why an important project stalled and you rarely hear that one team did bad work. The engineers were good. The agency was fine. The sales hires were solid. Looked at one by one, the work holds up.
The launch still slipped, or the raise dragged on, or the new system went live and nobody used it. When we look closely, the problem is almost always in the handoffs between teams.
What goes wrong at a handoff
A handoff is any point where one group passes work to another. Strategy to design, design to engineering, engineering to marketing, marketing to sales. Most companies have dozens of them and don't notice until something breaks.
Four things go wrong, over and over.
- The reasoning gets lost. The next team sees the decision but not the options that were ruled out or why. When the decision needs revisiting, they start from scratch and often land somewhere different.
- Work sits and waits. Each team plans its own work. Nobody plans the gaps between teams, so that's where the weeks go.
- Mistakes show up late. The next team builds on an assumption the last team would have corrected in one sentence, and it gets caught when it's expensive to fix.
- Nobody owns the result. Each side can fairly assume the other owns the problem. Below the CEO, nobody owns the whole thing.
Diagram comparing two ways of running a complex initiative. Panel A, sequential handoffs: seven separate vendors in a chain, strategy, agency, development, marketing, sales, operations and capital. Work waits at every handoff, gets re-briefed, loses context, is duplicated, has no owner or drifts in scope, and the chain breaks before it reaches the end. Panel B, one objective: integrated workstreams in engineering, product, go-to-market, sales and capital run in parallel under a single objective, coordinate with each other along the way, and converge on execution.
Why the usual fixes don't help much
Companies know handoffs are costly. The common responses are longer briefs, more coordination, or hiring one big firm to do everything.
Longer briefs pass along facts but not judgement. Coordinators and steering committees make the gaps visible, but someone who isn't doing the work can't stop the handoff from going wrong. And inside a big firm, the strategy team and the delivery team are often as separate as two companies.
What works better
Have fewer handoffs, and put someone in charge of the ones that are left. In practice that means one senior team holds the goal and does the work across whatever it touches.
- The goal is written as a result. A deck isn't the goal, a closed round is. A website isn't the goal, qualified pipeline is.
- The people deciding the architecture write the code. The people writing the positioning sit in on the sales calls. The reasoning never has to be passed along because it stays with the same people.
- Trade-offs get made once, in the open, by people who understand all the consequences. Cutting a feature to hit a date is a product, engineering and marketing decision at the same time.
- There's one weekly review of the goal, not a status update from every team.
Diagram: a loop of six stages, executive alignment, workstreams, weekly operating review, decisions, execution and measurement, with measurement feeding back into the next review.
What this doesn't mean
You still need your lawyers, your accountants and your own hires. The point is that on the few projects that decide your year, someone should own the space between all of those people and make sure the pieces add up.
A quick test
Take the most important project in your company right now. Is there anyone below the CEO who can answer these in one conversation?
- What result are we after, and by when?
- What is the biggest thing in the way right now?
- What did engineering, marketing, sales and finance each decide this week, and do those decisions line up?
- What are we doing differently next week because of what we learned?
If nobody can, the project is being run as a chain of handoffs, and that's where it will slip.