Let me be honest — when I first heard the term "Operational Excellence," I rolled my eyes a little. It sounded like corporate speak. Something your manager's manager talks about in a slide deck that nobody reads. Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen — words that felt like they belonged in a factory floor, not in a terminal window or a pull request. But then I started paying closer attention to the teams that actually shipped things well. Consistently. Without chaos. Without heroics every Friday evening. And I realized — they weren't just good at writing code. They were operationally excellent. What Operational Excellence Actually Means (In Plain Terms) Forget the jargon for a second. Operational excellence, at its core, is about doing the right thing, the right way, every time — and continuously getting better at it. That's it. In engineering terms? It's the difference between a team that has a runbook nobody reads vs. a team whose runbook is actually updated, tested, and followed.…