Handoff

A handoff is the transfer of state, context, and ownership between two agents in a workflow. Good handoff design is, in our view, the single largest determinant of whether an agentic marketing system actually produces shippable work. Workflows fail at handoffs more often than they fail anywhere else.

The practical anatomy of a good handoff has four parts: an explicit state object that is passed from the upstream agent to the downstream agent (not implicit, not reconstructed); a defined contract that the downstream agent can read to know what the upstream agent has done and what the downstream agent is expected to do; a checkpoint that verifies the state is well-formed before the downstream agent begins; and a defined error path for the case where the state is malformed or incomplete.

Most real-world failure modes we have observed share a structure: the upstream agent does its work, produces output that looks fine in isolation, but the output is shaped slightly differently than the downstream agent expects. The downstream agent does not refuse the work — it tries — and produces something that looks like an attempt at the right output but is subtly miscalibrated. The error is hard to trace because no single agent failed; the workflow as a whole failed at the seam. The discipline of designing seams as first-class artifacts of the workflow, rather than as incidental glue, is what separates serious agentic-marketing engineering from the demo-quality version that does not survive contact with production.