Emergency handover: Our lead designer is leaving — now what?

Employee offboarding guide for non-designing executives

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Emergency relevance check

Does this story resemble your situation?

Your lead designer’s contract suddenly ended. This senior person has been on your product/marketing team for a while. They’ve handled all kinds of design matters well. You are not quite sure which exactly.

Now you need to handle the offboarding. You might be a non-designing colleague — people operations specialist, exec, the CEO. Or perhaps you are a designer from another domain or department. In any case, you struggle with where to start, and the clock is ticking.

As a senior designer, I can help you with tips from my own experience. Let’s handle this emergency offboarding with efficiency and kindness.

How much time do you have?

1. 3 hours
2. One day
3. Three days
4. Five days

Emergency handover is not ideal. Unless it’s absolutely necessary due to agreed circumstances, prefer doing an offboarding project instead. It’s more humane, helps the team and uncovers the silent knowhow.

Planning chat

Get yourself and the departing designer a cup of good coffee and have a grounding 30-minute sanity check.

1. Define the deadline
   Then, discount the available time by 20%. Emergency handover can be tricky. Departing designers, like anyone else, also need time for being a human — taking breaks and saying farewells.
2. Cross-check the standard checklist
   See if anything is missing and estimate how much time it takes to complete all the important to-dos.
3. Estimate remaining time
   If you both agree that completing standard tasks might leave you with some extra time — define how much. Here you should also consider the vibe. If there are severe tensions in the team, or if the person is in a hurry — don’t keep them hanging around for more than is needed.
4. Pick and prioritize design-adjacent to-dos
   Then, cross-check the suggested lists below, refine and pre-sort them as needed in order of priority — and start ticking things off the list.

Standard checklist

The basic checklist usually includes things such as getting a written resignation, handling communication and the exit interview, and planning how to return the equipment.

If this is your first offboarding, use the opportunity to note down what is happening. This way, next time, you don’t have to start from scratch.

3-hour handover

If the lead designer and you have 3 extra hours, consider doing this:

1. List design apps and subscriptions in use
2. Share access to the apps — email, password, 2FA
3. List ongoing projects and their status, like finetuning or discovery
4. Connect to people responsible for ongoing and recent projects

And that’s about all the time you’ll have.

1-day handover

In case you have a full day, go with everything in the 3-hour handover and:

1. Key info about the design team, e.g. 1-on-1 notes or “hiring pipeline”
2. An intro/handover to ongoing project(s), e.g. “where to find stuff”
3. References where to find main design assets, e.g. original logo files

3-day handover

All in 1-day handover plus:

1. Talk about the remaining design team in depth; roles, responsibilities
2. Improve and clean-up notes on “what’s important and where to find it”

The second one can take days, even weeks. Figuring out what’s needed, for whom, and why, is like cleaning up a warehouse with several owners.

Check-in on your departing designer a day before the deadline. Ask if they need support — such as refining priorities if time is running out. If you will be the go-to person regarding the handover outcome, start going through the documention on your own, now. This way, you’ll still have time to ask questions if needed.

5-day handover

Go for the 3-day handover, and:

1. Written guidelines and/or notes for one selected critical topic
2. A walkthrough on this critical topic with the relevant team

A critical topic might relate to recurring work that only the departing designer was handling so far. It can also concern something that will eventually require a new hire or a consultant.

Example themes

• “Our product discovery process, templates, and tools”
• “UX research methods we’ve used in our past projects”
• “Which DesignOps tasks you should continue doing”
• “Questions and things to look for in design hire interviews”
• “Our brand guidelines; does and don’ts”
• “How our component libraries work”
• “Marketing campaign steps and spec template”

Farewells

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Stop the work 1–2 hours before the time’s up. Use the remaining time for wrapping up and unwinding.

Sit down for a chat (or a call, if you’re remote)

• Go over what has been done
• Cross-check that all the absolutely-must-haves are ready
• Talk about the handover experience
• Ask if there’s anything on the departing designer’s mind

Once you’re done with the wrap-up, end on a high note. At a minimum, provide kind words about the departing designer’s work effort. Let the designer share their goodbyes with the team. Offer a kind final gesture. It can be a gift, flowers, coffee and cake. You can also schedule a warm call, a lunch date, or after-work drinks a week or two after the final day. Something that completes your collaboration with a positive memory.

You never know — your paths might cross again.

🌻