Why post-deploy verification deserves its own category

After a deploy, the hard part is often not the deploy. CI has already passed. The rollout has started. Dashboards mostly look normal. Then one small runtime signal moves, and someone has to decide whether it came from this deploy or whether it is just noise. That window is short. Usually the first 15 minutes. But it shows up every time a team ships, and the more I worked around it, the less it felt like a normal monitoring problem. The decision is not "is the system healthy" When I first started