For most of a career, the unit of judgement was what you produced. Your code, your document, your design. That is shifting. Increasingly the unit is what you caused to exist and then stood behind, and a growing share of it will be work you did not type yourself. A teammate's. A contractor's. A tool's.
This is a different skill from the one most of us spent a decade practising, and it is worth getting deliberate about now rather than in the year it turns up in your job description.
It splits into two halves, and people are usually weak at the opposite one from the one they assume.
The first half is specifying. Can you describe a piece of work precisely enough that a competent stranger produces the right thing. That means saying what done looks like, what must not change, what to do at the edges, and which constraints are real rather than preferences of yours. Most bad handovers are not laziness. They are a description that was only ever clear to the person holding the context.
The second half is checking. Reviewing something you did not build, against a real standard, without quietly rewriting it into the version you would have written. That means knowing what you would look at first, what the likely failure is, and what evidence would actually convince you. If your only mode of verification is reading it and feeling fine, that will not survive the volume going up.
You can practise both this month with no new tools. Write your next handover as though you will be unreachable for a week, then watch where the questions come back, and fix the description rather than the person. Review a change without touching it, and ask what you would need to see before putting your name next to it. Get comfortable saying the sentence out loud. What would make me confident this is right.
None of this is new, which is the encouraging part. It is what good leads and good reviewers and good mentors have always done. What is changing is that it stops being a senior privilege and becomes an ordinary part of the job a great deal earlier.
The people who handle that well will be the ones who already know how to hand something over and mean it.
– Asael Shinder
