The operational breakdown, context loss, or delay that occurs when a project, process, or dataset is transferred between different teams, departments, or software modules.

Brandished by management consultants and workflow optimization vendors to frame routine communication lapses as structural operational abysses requiring expensive software fixes.

• Communication Deficit Framing: Using "gap" vocabulary to make an employee forgetting to send an email sound like an architectural software breakdown.
• Vendor Justification: Inventing a named operational problem to justify selling multi-thousand-dollar workflow tracking dashboards.
• Kitchen Reality Check: Like passing a hot pan to a line cook without telling them it is hot, dropping it, and calling the mess a "handoff gap."

Glengarry Glen Ross (1990s) scene where the real estate leads are physically passed from management to the desperate salespeople, resulting in immediate operational chaos and lost sales because no context came with the paper.

Information lost when work is passed between teams or systems.

“Our platform maps the handoff gap between product strategy and engineering execution.”

“We wrote down a clear checklist so design context isn't lost when we hand projects over to the backend developers.”