Why the handover is where good work goes to die
Most projects lose their quality in one place: the moment the people who understood the problem stop being the people in the room.
Every studio has a story about the project that was excellent on the day it shipped and unrecognisable a year later. The design was right, the build was right, and then the people who knew why moved on, and every decision after that was made without the reasons.
The gap is structural
It is not that the next team is careless. It is that a system carries its reasons in the heads of the people who made it, and a handover transfers the files but not the heads. Documentation helps, and we write a lot of it — but the only reliable fix we have found is to stay.
What staying looks like
The same people through understanding, building, testing and transition, and a long tail after launch where they are still reachable. It is slower to scale and easier to trust, and for the kind of work we do, trust is the product.