In most software projects, the handoff between design and engineering is a formality. A Figma file gets shared, someone says "let me know if you have questions," and the engineers start building from their own interpretation.
At Tailo, we treat the handoff differently — because the decisions made at that point determine whether the assistant that gets built matches the assistant that was designed.
Why it matters more in AI projects
In a traditional software project, the handoff gap mostly produces visual inconsistencies. In an AI assistant project, the gap produces something more fundamental: an assistant that behaves differently than designed.
The prompt, the knowledge base structure, the edge case handling, the escalation paths — all of these involve judgment calls. If the engineer building the assistant has to make those calls in isolation, they'll make them based on what seems reasonable. That's not the same as what was designed.
What our handoff meeting covers
We run a structured handoff meeting for every project. It covers:
The blueprint, section by section — every design decision, walked through together.
The open questions — every blueprint has questions that weren't fully resolved in discovery. We surface these explicitly rather than leaving them to be answered during the build.
The test scenarios — the specific examples from the client's workflow that the assistant needs to handle correctly. These become the standard we build toward.
The escalation design — explicit decisions about what happens when the assistant can't help.
Why this produces better assistants
The handoff meeting doesn't add significant time to the project — it typically takes two hours. But those two hours prevent two weeks of rework and a final product that's slightly off in ways nobody can quite articulate.
When everyone involved in the build is aligned on what's being built and why, the build goes faster and the result is closer to what was intended. In an AI project, where the decisions compound, this matters even more.