Design handoff is by far the most stressful part of the design process. In many organizations, design handoff causes a lot of friction and back and forth. All too often, it happens because the design team thinks about design handoff as a one-directional exchange (“We’ve just sent them our design, all they need to do is code it”). But in reality, there can be a lot of factors that impact design, from tech feasibility to business requirements.
But there is a solution to this problem — The Hot Potato Process, originally defined by Dan Mall and Brad Frost
What is the Hot Potato Process
The process gets its name from the children’s game “hot potato,” where an object is passed around quickly, with no one holding onto it for too long. Product teams that follow the Hot Potato process pass ideas quickly back and forth from designer to developer and back to designer, then back to developer for the entirety of a product creation cycle. 
Hot Potato Process. Image by Dan Mall.
Why Hot Potato
The best handoff is no handoff. Teams that follow the Hot Potato process don’t have a handoff, a separate step in the design process. Instead, they exchange ideas all the time. And this exchange is bidirectional, meaning that designers and developers refine product ideas together in real-time. The prototype designers and devs are working on becomes the living spec of the project. And since the interaction happens on a regular basis, both designers and developers start to use the same language when discussing it.
How to make the most of Hot Potato
Designers and developers sit together
Create designer + developer pairs to maximize work efficiency. Ideally, they should sit together in person, but if it is impossible, it’s okay to use real-time synchronous tools to simulate working together in a co-located way. For example, have a Zoom chat open during working sessions.
Both designers and developers work together at the same time
Unlike the waterfall process, where developers wait for designers to provide a ready-to-implementation design, the Hot Potato process invites developers not to wait for designers. Consider what designers could do while developers are busy and what developers could do while designers busy. This will enable both teams to work together simultaneously.
Iterative prototyping
New ideas should be quickly turned into prototypes. Once prototypes are created, they’re passed around quickly for feedback and refinement. Each new iteration builds on the previous one, leading to better solutions over time.
Design & Development phase of product design process. Image by Ted Goas
Start small
Hot Potato can introduce a radical change in how people design products, so you can expect a lot of pushback from team members. To minimize the risk of resistance to change, start introducing Hot Potato for small projects. Pick one or two projects where you could test the new collaborative approach. Demonstrate the success of the projects to motivate team members to embrace the new approach.
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Hot Potato Process As Replacement for Design Handoff was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
