[obiefernandez]

> If your team is full of competent, driven engineers, removing their blockers is the fastest way to enable forward movement.

That's a HUGE if right there. In my experience, the most problematic teams I've ever worked with were simply full of incompetent and/or unmotivated engineers, and for whatever reason it was impossible to replace them.

[prepend]

I think the challenge with this is that blockers only get removed once and super awesome teams preemptively remove blockers before they block.

So while it’s good to remove obstacles and maybe helpful to measure if obstacles exist that’s bad, it doesn’t mean much when no obstacles exist and none have been removed in a long time. Maybe they are super awesome and chugging along from all those removed obstacles. Maybe they are super sucky because they don’t see things as obstacles.