Pre-release

• main pipeline fully green, including e2e, accessibility and performance budgets
• Dependency audit clean or exceptions documented
• Migrations reviewed by a human; backup taken; rollback or recovery plan written
• Environment variables and secrets set for production; previews still isolated
• Feature flags in the intended state
• Changelog entry and version tag ready
• Rollback path tested (platform rollback or previous tag)
• Error tracking, uptime checks and alerts active for this release
• Post-deploy smoke test defined; someone watching errors and latency for the first hour
• User-facing docs or notes updated