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Handoff Wizard

Your First Handover

This page walks every screen you’ll see, in order, from first launch to published handover. Plan on the whole flow taking about 6 hours of your time spread across two weeks of calendar time. You can pause and resume at any step — the app autosaves continuously.

Step 1 — Onboarding (≈30 min)

The wizard opens to a 7-step stepper. Each step takes 1-5 minutes.

1.1 Welcome

A short orientation screen explaining the four-track flow (Files, Interviews, Drafts, Validation) and the BYO-key data model. Click Continue.

1.2 Sign in (SSO)

Sign in with Google or Microsoft. The wizard uses your identity only to associate you with the project code your employer set up — we don’t read your email or calendar.

If SSO fails: check that pop-ups are allowed for app.handoffwiz.com, then retry. See Troubleshooting.

1.3 Project code

Enter the HND-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX code from your employer’s email. The wizard validates it against the licensing API in real time.

If you get “Project code rejected”, double-check the code with your employer — they regenerate it from the admin dashboard if needed. See Troubleshooting.

Read and accept three consent items:

  1. Source files stay on your laptop and are never transmitted to Handoff servers.
  2. AI prompts hit Anthropic and your employer’s GCP NotebookLM tenant — both are systems you (or your employer) control.
  3. Anonymized telemetry events are sent to Handoff for product improvement.

You must accept all three to proceed. See handoffwiz.com/security for the full data-flow architecture.

1.5 Anthropic key

Paste your Anthropic API key (starts with sk-ant-). The wizard validates it with a free-tier ping (/v1/messages with a 1-token request). The key is stored in your OS keychain (Windows Credential Manager / macOS Keychain) — never in plaintext on disk, never on Handoff servers.

If validation fails, see Troubleshooting.

1.6 GCP credentials

Drag-drop the GCP service account JSON file your employer provided. The wizard parses it locally, validates the schema, confirms aiplatform.notebooks.create permission, and stores it in your OS keychain.

If validation fails, see Troubleshooting or GCP permission failure.

1.7 Archetype

Pick your role archetype. For v1, only “Operations” is available — the dropdown shows greyed-out entries for Sales, Customer Success, and Engineering with a “v1.5” badge. Click Operations and continue.

Onboarding complete. The wizard transitions to the dashboard.

Step 2 — File intake (≈15 min of your time)

The dashboard has four tracks: Files, Interviews, Drafts, Validation. The Files track opens first.

Drag a folder containing your operational source files onto the file intake screen — internal docs, runbooks, meeting notes, decision logs, customer-facing playbooks. The wizard ingests up to 10,000 files or 5 GB total, whichever is lower.

What gets ingested:

  • Tier-1 (high signal): PDFs, Word docs, Markdown, Google Doc exports, plain text, runbooks, decision logs.
  • Tier-2 (lower signal): Slack/Teams exports, calendar exports, email exports.
  • Skipped: images without OCR, video, audio, binaries, anything over 100 MB per file (split or skip — see Troubleshooting).

You see a per-file tier badge, a strip count of skipped files, and an estimated total content footprint. When the bar fills, the Files track is at 100%.

You don’t have to wait for ingest to finish to start interviews. Both tracks run independently.

Step 3 — Interview sessions (≈4 sessions × 30-45 min = ~3 hours)

The Interviews track opens four sessions in fixed order for the Operations archetype:

  1. Work in One Hour — what does your day-to-day actually look like, what decisions did you make this week, what’s on your plate right now.
  2. Systems & Access — what tools you use, how you access them, who has admin/billing/support, where the secrets live.
  3. People & Decisions — your stakeholder map, who you talk to about what, why your team is structured the way it is, recent decisions and the reasoning behind each.
  4. Open Loops & Post-Departure — what’s still mid-flight, what needs to land in your successor’s hands in week 1, the soft tribal-knowledge stuff.

Each session is a chat-style interview with Claude. Type your answers. The wizard probes follow-up questions when an answer is shallow, summarizes back to you, and asks you to confirm or clarify.

Pause + resume at any time. The app autosaves on every keystroke. Close the laptop mid-session and resume hours later — you’ll re-enter at the exact question.

After each session you review a session summary (~2 pages). You can edit any answer inline before clicking Approve session. A session must be approved to count toward the Interviews track.

All 4 sessions approved → Interviews track at 100% → synthesis unlocks.

Step 4 — Synthesis (~10-20 min, background)

When all four interview sessions are approved AND the Files track is at 100%, the wizard unlocks the synthesis pipeline. Click Generate drafts.

Synthesis runs as a background worker. You don’t have to keep the app open — close the laptop, the worker checkpoints state and resumes on next launch. Most runs land in 10-20 minutes against a typical Operations corpus.

The output is 16 archetype-specific knowledge documents:

  • Role overview, day-in-the-life, weekly cadence
  • Decision log, stakeholder map, vendor map
  • Top 10 recurring tasks (with playbooks)
  • Open loops + week-1 priorities for the successor
  • Crisis-response runbook
  • Plus 6 archetype-specific docs (financial close cadence, compliance calendar, hiring pipeline, customer escalation matrix, board prep, and operational metrics dashboard)

Per-doc median cost is about $0.40 on your Anthropic key.

When synthesis finishes, the Drafts track flips to “16 docs ready for review”.

Step 5 — Draft review (~30 min)

Open each of the 16 docs. For each, you have three actions:

  • Approve — locks the doc as-is.
  • Edit + Approve — make inline edits in the markdown editor, save, and approve.
  • Reject + Regenerate — supply a reason (free-form text) and the wizard regenerates that doc with your reason added to the prompt.

Most users approve 12-13 of the 16 cleanly, edit 2-3 lightly, and regenerate 0-1. Budget 2-3 minutes per doc.

Step 6 — Gold validation (≈15 min)

When all 16 drafts are approved, the Validation track unlocks. Click Run gold validation.

The wizard runs the 35-question gold suite against your approved drafts. Each question gets a pass (the answer in the docs is grounded and citation-backed) or fail (the docs don’t have enough detail for a confident grounded answer).

The publish gate is ≥30 of 35 must pass. Below that, the publish button stays disabled with a tooltip pointing at the failing questions. To recover:

  1. Open a failing question — the wizard shows the question text and which interview session it tried to source from.
  2. Click Add detail — the wizard re-opens that session for a focused 5-minute follow-up.
  3. Re-run validation.

Most users land at 32-34/35 on first run.

Step 7 — NotebookLM upload (~5 min)

When validation passes, click Publish to NotebookLM. The wizard uses your GCP service account to:

  1. Create a new NotebookLM Enterprise notebook in your employer’s GCP project.
  2. Upload all 16 approved docs as sources.
  3. Apply a generated readme + the 35 sample questions as a starter studio note.
  4. Return the notebook URL.

If upload fails, see GCP NotebookLM upload failure.

Step 8 — Handoff complete

The dashboard shows a green Published state with the NotebookLM URL. Your employer’s admin contact gets an automated email with:

  • The NotebookLM URL
  • A link to the admin dashboard at app.handoffwiz.com
  • The 35 sample questions, formatted for their successor onboarding doc

You’re done. The app stays installed for 30 days post-publish to support successor Q&A — your employer (and successor) can ping you through the in-app chat for clarifications. After 30 days the app self-uninstalls.

Welcome to the other side of your handover.