PracticeToLead

  What Are Impediments in Agile? In Agile, impediments are anything that slows down or blocks a team's productivity—and ultimately affects product delivery. Agile or not, impediments are a daily reality. At PracticeToLead , we interviewed several engineering leaders who echoed the same concern: current Scrum/Agile tools don't offer a solid way to track and escalate impediments. Really? So What? Yes. If you search for solutions, the best advice you'll find is “create a separate Jira project to track them.”. Even though tools like Rally Software has a feature specifically for this. BUT Jira owns ⅔ of the market. Most organizations either: Leave it to Scrum/Agile teams to handle impediments themselves (generally the right default), and/or Rely on managers to escalate the serious ones ad hoc. But this creates real problems: Delayed visibility: Stakeholders don’t hear about risks until it’s too late. The team has likely been struggling for a while by then. No institutional memo...

(NOTE: This was written by ChatGPT) In the last few weeks, I heard detailed stories of how engineers spun up a site, or a tool, in no time or effort using tools like Copilot, Cursor, and LangGraph.. What used to take a day or two of setup, scaffolding, and hand-rolled edge case handling? Done in an hour. I wasn’t surprised. This is the new normal. And I love it. But it got me thinking—not about the end of software engineer(ing) (that story’s already been oversold), but about the role of the engineering lead who loves to tinker, who loves to hack things nights and weekends. Because let’s be real—generative AI is amazing at building MVPs, automating tedious boilerplate, debugging obscure issues, and even spinning up design patterns we once considered “architectural decisions.” It’s like pair programming with someone who read every GitHub repo and Stack Overflow answer—ever. If you’re an IC, it’s the best assistant you’ve ever had. If you’re a tech lead who thrives by jumping in, proto...