Handoff isn't "design's done, figure out the rest" — it's structured information transfer so engineers never have to guess a pixel. Tools like Figma's Inspect panel do the heavy lifting: select an element and it surfaces spacing, hex codes, font name and size, and downloadable SVG assets automatically.
Redlines — the measurement lines for spacing and size — are only one piece of a handoff. The rest is annotation: how a component responds across screen sizes (responsive rules), what states exist (hover, disabled, error), and how the layout breaks with an empty value or an unusually long string. None of that ever comes through from static measurements alone.
Teams with an established design system have light handoffs — they just point at a component that already exists in code. Teams without one end up with thicker handoff documents, and correspondingly more time designers and engineers need to spend confirming things face to face.
When to use
Do it right after final design approval, just before development starts. Hand off a design that's still in flux and engineers end up building values that change out from under them.