Practice
The handover is the product
If your team cannot ship without us three months after we leave, we did the job badly — regardless of what we delivered.
Priya Raghavan · · 5 min read
The consultancy business model has an uncomfortable incentive at its centre: the longer you are needed, the more you are paid. Most firms resolve this by not thinking about it very hard. We would rather resolve it by planning the exit in week one.
Signs the handover will fail
- The client team has not opened a pull request in your repository.
- Architecture decisions live in your heads and your Slack history.
- Deployment requires someone from your side to be awake.
- The documentation was written in the final fortnight.
What we do instead
We work in your repository, your CI and your cloud from the first commit. Client engineers pair with us on every feature after week four — not as observers, as authors. Architecture decision records are written when the decision is made, while the alternatives are still fresh enough to describe honestly.
In the final phase we deliberately step back: your team leads the work, we review. It is the least billable-looking part of the engagement and by some distance the most valuable one.
“We measure success by how quickly you stop needing us. It is an awkward business model and a very good filter for the right clients.”