Badges are a floor, not a ceiling
A partner badge tells you a firm has cleared a baseline of certifications and committed sales motion. That is useful as a filter, but it tells you almost nothing about whether the team in front of you can ship.
What capability looks like in practice
- Engineers who can debug a Unity Catalog policy at 2am.
- Architects who have made the cost trade-offs on real workloads, not slides.
- Delivery leads who push back when the use case is wrong.
How to test for it
Skip the deck. Walk through a real scenario: a stuck pipeline, a governance question, a cost spike. The answers, or the absence of them, will tell you everything.