One thing my old BigCo does right is put a solution level between sales and execution that has veto authority on any project -- our job was to manage everything

One thing my old BigCo does right is put a solution level between sales and execution that has veto authority on any project -- our job was to manage everything from scope to risk to staffing and timelines going into the deal, just to ensure that projects would run as cleanly as possible. If a client balked at the time or price of a project, then we'd step in and renegotiate scope, risk mitigation, expectations, and responsibility until a balance was struck. If, after all that, we felt that a project was too high-risk, we (or any partner tasked with oversight) could pocket-veto the sale by refusing to sign off on it. (It's a testament to the sales teams that I rarely had to exercise that veto; out of those times, twice I had a veto overridden by partners higher up the food chain, and both times the projects failed along the load-bearing lines we identified.) It doesn't always work out as planned, of course, but, in my experience (over a couple hundred million dollars' worth of work), we stuck the landing much more often than we failed. Trying to do this inside a company is a significantly different and more difficult experience, certainly, and it only works if the c-suite puts their muscle behind a disciplined innovation process that can exercise those same kinds of authority across internal silos. I'll also point out that BigCo aligned on this overall approach because we, like most strategy/tech consultancies, experienced a lot of failures to launch, and burned out a lot of developers and designers along the way. When half the firm is coming out of massive waterfall-style projects that often fail because they're brittle and push risks to the very end, and the other half is used to just throwing devs at two-week timeblocks until something ships or everyone quits, you've got to find an approach that gives you as much knowledge and shape up front as possible, while still letting the development efforts come together flexibly through the dev process. Kudos to them for getting that done.