From hand-offs to handshakes: how Atono supports cross-functional flow
Great software isn’t passed along—it’s built hand in hand.
We were in a retrospective last month when Dylan mentioned something that stuck with me.
"I keep Chrome tab groups for stories I've recently finished," he said. "That way I can check back while QA's testing them. When bugs come up, I can see them getting added right in the linked items section instead of hunting through Slack or waiting for someone to ping me."
It hit me that Dylan wasn't describing a workflow we'd taught him. He'd naturally developed this habit because Atono makes it easy to stay connected to work even after your part is "done."
That's when I realized we'd been thinking about collaboration all wrong.
Most development tools treat teamwork like a relay race—product managers create requirements, designers hand off mockups, developers implement features, QA finds bugs. Each person does their part, then passes the baton.
But what if the best collaboration isn't about clean handoffs at all?
Why handoffs break down
We've all been there. You're working on a story and realize the original acceptance criteria don't quite make sense anymore. Or QA finds a bug and you can't remember why you implemented something a particular way. Or a designer's mockup looks great but doesn't account for an edge case you discovered during development.
The relay race approach assumes each person can work in isolation, then pass along perfect information to the next person. But software development doesn't work that way. Context shifts. Requirements evolve. New information surfaces that changes everything.
Here's what we noticed before building Atono: every handoff was a potential point of failure. Not because people weren't doing good work, but because the tools forced artificial boundaries between roles that needed to stay connected.
In other tools, important context lived in different places:
Requirements in the project management tool
Design rationale in Figma comments
Implementation decisions scattered across code comments and Slack threads
Bug context fragmented between multiple systems
By the time work reached QA, half the original context had disappeared. By the time a bug made it back to development, the story behind the story was gone.
Keeping everyone in the conversation
We designed Atono around a different philosophy: instead of optimizing for clean handoffs, we optimize for ongoing conversation.
This shows up in how our team actually works. Lex captures it well: "The body of stories in Atono is edited a lot more than in other tools I used before. As a result, the body is not a fossilized version of some early thinking and is a lot closer to what was actually implemented."
That's the key insight. Stories shouldn't be static documents that get passed around. They should be living workspaces where context accumulates and evolves.
When Sandra's working on a feature, she toggles feature flags right from the story to test functionality before it goes live. When Aaron needs to understand which bugs need attention first, he filters by risk rating and can immediately see how each bug connects back to its originating story. When Lex wants to reference a specific acceptance criterion in Slack, he can link directly to it without worrying about the reference breaking if the criteria get reordered.
Each of these workflows eliminates a potential handoff. Instead of passing information between systems, the information stays connected to the work itself.
What we learned from staying connected
The biggest surprise was how much smoother things got when we stopped forcing handoffs.
Take our Slack integration. When teams create channels from stories, conversations stay linked to the work. Gabrielle mentioned how this helps coordinate feature releases: "With our feature flag SDK connected to multiple apps, we can coordinate releases effortlessly across platforms." The Slack channel becomes part of the story's history, not a separate conversation that might get lost.
Or consider how Aaron describes working with QA: "When QA lets me know about new bugs for a story they'll either send me a link so I can jump on it right away, but if I'm checking back at the stories in my Chrome tabs I can see the bugs being added right in the linked items section."
Notice what's happening here. QA isn't "handing off" bugs to development. They're adding context to shared work that development is already connected to. Aaron doesn't have to reconstruct what he was thinking three weeks ago because the story contains the full evolution of the work.
This eliminates what teams often call "the toggle tax"— the productivity loss from constantly switching between disconnected tools to reconstruct context.
The Chrome extension that changes everything
One feature that really demonstrates this philosophy is our Chrome extension. When Kevin finds a bug while testing, the extension automatically captures context like URL, browser details, console errors, and network requests. But instead of creating an isolated bug report, it connects that context back to relevant stories.
"I've been using our browser extension to log bugs in Atono—it automatically captures my browser and other key details, so developers have everything they need right away," Kevin explains.
This isn't just about saving time. It's about preserving the connection between the bug and the work it relates to. When developers see the bug, they also see the acceptance criteria that were supposed to be met, the feature flags that might be involved, and the full context of what the feature was meant to accomplish.
A few people at SaaStock specifically said "woah" when we showed this in action. Not because the technical capability is revolutionary, but because most tools force you to manually recreate these connections every time.
Building for continuous collaboration
The more we use Atono ourselves, the more we see how small design decisions add up to support continuous collaboration.
Comments feel more like Google Docs than traditional ticket systems—ephemeral discussions that help work forward rather than formal documentation that needs to be preserved forever. The Everything page lets anyone see related work across teams without having to know which backlog it lives in. Feature flags stay embedded in stories so you never lose sight of why you're toggling something on or off.
None of these features are revolutionary on their own. But together, they create an environment where collaboration flows naturally instead of being forced through artificial handoff points.
We're still learning, of course. Balancing team autonomy with cross-team visibility isn't always straightforward. Some decisions still require formal coordination. Not every workflow maps perfectly to our current feature set.
But the fundamental insight holds: the best software development happens when tools support ongoing partnership rather than sequential handoffs.
Handshakes over handoffs
Dylan's Chrome tab habit wasn't something we designed for explicitly. But it emerged naturally because Atono makes it easy to stay connected to work as it evolves.
That's the kind of collaboration we're trying to enable. Not perfect handoffs between isolated roles, but ongoing handshakes between team members who stay engaged throughout the development process.
Software development is inherently collaborative and iterative. The tools should support that reality, not fight against it.
When context stays connected to work, when conversations link back to decisions, when team members can see how their contributions fit into the bigger picture—that's when cross-functional teams really start to flow.
We're still figuring out all the implications of this approach. But we're convinced the future of development tools lies in supporting continuous collaboration rather than optimizing for clean boundaries between roles.
Because the best software isn't built through handoffs. It's built through handshakes.
Ready to eliminate handoffs in your workflow?
Start building with continuous collaboration.