Ways of working
What three years of remote-first taught us about handoffs
The meeting was never the handoff. The document was.
Priya Raman
Three time zones forced us to write things down. It turned out the writing was the valuable part, and the meeting had only ever been a ceremony around it.
When half the team is asleep, a handoff has to survive without its author. That constraint did more for our documentation than any policy ever did.
What we kept
A written decision record per change, a single owner per surface, and a rule that no decision counts until it exists in text someone else can disagree with.
If it only exists in the call, it will be relitigated within a month.