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CS Handoff ​

Happy path, known limitations, likely questions, escalation path. CS reads it before customers do. A handoff that arrives at release-day is a handoff CS didn't have time to absorb.

Owners: PO, CS Lead Phase it lives in: How We Build (Volume IV) The corpus principle this enacts: Support is a signal collection system for reality — and only collects what it understands.

Where it lives in the chain ​

What a CS handoff contains ​

  1. What's new — one paragraph in CS-speak (not engineering-speak).
  2. Happy path — "Gal opens the exam, clicks Grade, the new shortcut moves to the next exam." Step by step.
  3. Known limitations — what isn't in this release, named. "Not yet available in Hebrew. Not yet supported on tablets." So CS isn't surprised when customers ask.
  4. Likely questions and answers — the three or four the PO can predict. "How do I turn this off? It's not optional this release. Will I get the old way back? No, unless the signal reading shows we should."
  5. Escalation path — for L1 questions: how to look it up. For L2: how to reproduce. For L3: how to file a JIRA bug with the chain-aware label.
  6. Dashboard link — the leading-signals dashboard CS can read to see whether their tickets correlate with usage patterns.

How to do this ​

  • Written 1 week before release. Not on release day. Not the night before.
  • Walked through with CS Lead in a 30-minute session. Questions there become updates to the handoff before customers ask them.
  • Living document — updated through the gradual rollout as the team learns from the first 1% and 5%.

What good practice looks like ​

A CS team that reads the handoff and asks three sharp questions before release is a CS team that catches three classes of tickets before they become tickets. Each question is either answered in the handoff or surfaces a gap in the release brief. Either outcome makes the release better.

A team that ships without handoff produces a CS team that learns the feature from the customer's tickets — and the first wave of tickets are the team teaching CS what the feature does, in real-time, at the cost of customer trust.

200apps · How We Work · NWIRE

Internal corpus. Voice and structure © 200apps.