I escalated. I escalated in month two, in month four, and in month six. Each time, Vincent's answer was the same: "Find a way." Each time, I told him the engineering estimate was seventy to ninety percent over what he had scoped. Each time, he told me that was my problem. In month seven, I went to his boss — the partner above Vincent, a woman named Mina — and I told her the project was under-scoped, the timeline was impossible, and I thought we needed to renegotiate with the client. Mina said, "That's Vincent's call. I trust Vincent." I went back to my desk. I tried, for four more months, to deliver an impossible project with a team that was physically unable to do it. In month eleven, we delivered a system that worked in two of the three warehouses, integrated with five of the nine downstream tools, and supported about forty percent of the client's SKUs. The client's operations director — a man named Denny Castellano, who I had developed a real working relationship with — called me on a Friday afternoon and said, "This isn't what we bought."