Handover.ai – Knowledge transfer made easy

I think this is a great idea for a product, but in my experience, the pain associated with handover is something that is earned over a long period of time. Knowledge starts to centralise in one person and they don’t do enough to disperse it. Maybe they are too busy, maybe they don’t value documentation, maybe it’s an oversight, there are lots of reasons. But that problem starts to build up and you only discover the full extent of it when they leave and it hits you all at once.<p>A better solution to this problem would be to improve detecting this problem so you can address it in its early stages instead of when it gets bad. One way of doing this is mandatory time off. I don’t recall who said it first, but <i>time off is chaos monkey for people</i>. It’s common in some industries for employees to be forced to take time off to intentionally cause their normal tasks to be performed without them. For instance, banks use it to detect fraud, because the same person doing the same task all the time can make it easy for them to cover crimes up.<p>If your team is stuck in a rut and the same person is always responsible for doing important tasks every time, this is a risk. If they took some time off, this would help you figure out what knowledge is centralised with them. Don’t put their tasks off and wait until they get back. Figure out how to do it without them. If you struggle, that’s a clear sign you’ll be in for pain when they eventually leave for good and shows you what knowledge they need to disperse.

I get the use case, but realistically this type of tool is going to be used by HR right before they fire an employee, or as a step in the process to firing an employee.

I see this as addressing a symptom rather than the cause.<p>A direct result of technical staff leaving is the loss of siloed knowledge, instead of trying to address it at the final juncture, my opinion is that this type of knowledge should be proactively documented and shared with the rest of the team as the domain expert learns&#x2F;works on it. That way, they&#x27;re around to mentor other members, reduces the bus factor and when said person leaves, the rest of the team naturally continues their work rather than spending time on ramp up tasks.

And all of your secret sauce ends up on somebody else&#x27;s server.

This has merits, and I don&#x27;t want to criticize that. But, as a matter of practice, I&#x27;d like to suggest, if you have the resources to task another experienced person to do a recorded interview, that might yield better results.<p>My most recent example...<p>A software engineer had given notice, while finishing solo marathon coding on a complicated big new thing that I think no one else had yet seen.<p>So I (as the new principal engineer, knowing we need a huge brain dump before the info disappears forever) scheduled some of the engineer&#x27;s remaining time as top-priority, kept on them as their final-week marathon schedule kept shifting, and then recorded interviewing them with a screenshare.<p>Some of the things I asked could&#x27;ve been scripted questions, like starting with what is the purpose, where is the code, how to I get it all, how do I run it.<p>Then, scripted questions could ask about walking through the UI, or walking through the major parts.<p>But pretty quickly, I had to be asking questions that weren&#x27;t just going through the usual motions, but reflected concerns specific to what was being said, as well as things that I thought were the top priority to understand.<p>I don&#x27;t think an &quot;AI&quot; solution that is mostly LLM would have the insights that I did. It would be mostly scripted questions, maybe trying to get a sense of how much needs to be said about each thing in a template, and maybe mimicking things real software engineers have said in the past... but not handling well anything unusual.<p>Also, human rapport might get better information, or may even get the person to do it at all. Although I was new there, I was a fellow human, with whom the somewhat disgruntled employee had no grievance, and I was asking them to help me out, and investing in it myself. Not HR pointing them at an uncanny-valley robo-debriefer program that the company paid for, as a termination checklist item, and a ritual to perform their way through.<p>Also, if you have a rapport and some trust, and stop recording, and ask them something off-the-record, they just might tell you things candidly that are important to know, but that they&#x27;re not going to tell to an app video recording that goes who knows where. And if you can get the candid OTR, those might lead to additional important information that you can officially capture.

I also really like the idea for this product and can see lots of applications of the format&#x2F;medium beyond leaving employees&#x2F;handovers.<p>For example, I am currently transitioning my P&amp;L into a new dept. at a large organisation and the amount of work to onboard into my new manager &#x2F; team is significant and my weakness in the process is the structure &#x2F; organisation of my own documentation that allows me to surface the right information to the right people without repeating myself.<p>Similarly, I&#x27;ve joined new teams (small and large) as a new manager - here you want to quickly get up to speed on lots of projects and how things do&#x2F;don&#x27;t join together.<p>Personally, I would like to describe my situation to the tool about my role and (almost like a user story or &#x27;new manager, existing company&#x27; or &#x27;experienced manager, new company) have the tool react to the situation.

The issue is there is no incentive for the person leaving to make these handover docs and videos. They will just say the bare minimum and complete the task.

I&#x27;d love to be able to use this tool to write documentation that may not be specific to a &quot;handover&quot;.<p>I find it hard to know where to start, what to include and how to structure. Having a tool to prompt me along the way would be really helpful and I feel speed up the process of ideation and creation of documentation.

I&#x27;m working on a tool with a very similar business purpose but it isn&#x27;t sold as this because I&#x27;ve concluded you can&#x27;t sell this.<p>Apparently I need to move faster. Quitting the day job soon.

I kinda love this idea. I wonder if there would be any additional value to having the AI access the departing employees documents and&#x2F;or code. Or maybe coming up with a first draft of certain materials for the departing employee to correct, as needed. You could also generalize so that some tool like this becomes the source of institutional knowledge. Confluence but with videos and with AI generated or initiated content. What if you could have a dialogue with the AI version of the departed employee? Or an AI avatar capable of explaining institutional knowledge? But like not clippy, ok?

Here is a contrarian view. How about keeping a valuable team member instead of getting rid of them at the first chance? I can bet that the past 2-3 decades or so the American organizations forgot collectively the most they have ever forgotten since the Industrial Revolution.<p>A skill cannot be handed over. You can painfully train someone to acquire some of it over time, but certainly you cannot “hand it over”

I worry about documentation in particular for hallucination. In this context the source of truth (the employee) is leaving the company, and leaving behind a document that will itself be seen as the new source of truth. Risk of hallucination or even transcription failures are usually low because you can always just go back to the source of truth, but thats not the case here.

&gt; Workplace transitions are at an all-time high.<p>Lol, getting interviewed by an AI as your job gets taken by AI.

I honestly find it difficult to believe it could make knowledge transfer easier than, let&#x27;s say, a template for the employee to fill out. It (knowledge transfer) is such an unstructured thing and differs wildly from post to post, and from company to company.

Interesting product idea. For technical knowledge I don’t see this working at all, maybe for organizational knowledge?<p>Btw for larger European companies I think you will have a hard time due to trade secrets and privacy

I&#x27;m in the middle of this right now.. Handover would be super helpful. Cool concept. Kind of reminds me of I Robot where you can ask specific queries to holograms

please make the pause button stop the video. i bounced as soon as i discovered those controls were performative

Hotel Handover: You can be employed and laid off, but your AI avatar and knowledge never leaves us (and we can talk to you forever, for free).

Large corporations won’t bite. The higher ups don’t care or they would not do mass layoffs to kowtow to hedge funds or the stock market. Corporations throw people out like garbage. Go ask the Senior engineers at Microsoft who worked there for 22 years. Entire teams.