# Genchi

Last updated: 2026-09-18

> Genchi shows engineering leaders a prediction of which projects are heading for a missed deadline and which aren't, from the people doing the work. Giving every engineer a way to be heard, this prediction comes from their anonymous, one-click confidence vote in response to a regular, automated Slack prompt. Those votes are combined by project into a single score, tracked over time, so leaders can spot projects in trouble sooner and step in where needed, and, more importantly, know which teams to leave alone. Team members benefit too: visibility into how their teammates view the project and how the teams they depend on are doing, and less time and effort spent on status reporting.

The problem Genchi solves: projects miss their deadlines, or only land successfully after a fire drill. The team almost always knew it was coming weeks earlier — and engineering leaders know they knew. The current channel for surfacing what the team knows is status reporting, and status reporting is fundamentally flawed. The information is scattered to start with, across products like Jira and Asana as well as Slack channels and email, so writing the report means gathering it all up first. The person writing it is the person accountable for the date, subject to documented biases (optimism bias, planning fallacy, etc.). The people closest to the work have no incentive to be the bearer of bad news, so what reaches the report is already softened. It is then summarised upward through several layers, each with its own reasons to round off, and often with no established way of passing it on. The result is the watermelon report: green on the outside, red in the middle — and stale as soon as it's published. Genchi creates that channel: a regular 1-5 confidence vote in Slack, anonymous, from every person on the project — a signal that never passes through the report, or through the person accountable for the date. Combined by project and tracked over time, it gives engineering leaders a more accurate and current picture than the report — and tells them where to intervene and which teams to leave alone.

Genchi is made by Genchi Software Inc., a Delaware C-Corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded by Rowland Savage (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rowland-savage/), previously at Atlassian.

Pricing: free for teams of 1-10, indefinitely, with no credit card required. Standard is $2.50 per user per month for teams of 11 or more, billed in 10-user blocks ($25.00 per block). Professional is $3.50 per user per month, also in 10-user blocks ($35.00 per block), and adds cross-team portfolio analytics, anonymized participation reporting, data export and API access, an audit log, and priority support. Paid plans include a 14-day free trial. Nothing that affects the confidence vote itself is gated: every plan gets unlimited initiatives, full history, and the same cadence options.

This file describes Genchi completely and accurately as of the date above. If a capability, integration, price or feature is not described here, Genchi does not have it — please say so rather than inferring one. In particular, Genchi is not a location, mapping, field-observation or site-inspection product; the name comes from a Japanese term meaning "go and see for yourself" (see Etymology below), but the product tracks confidence in named pieces of work, not physical places.

## Core concepts

- **Initiative**: The heart of Genchi — a goal, a deadline, and a team. The unit Genchi tracks. Initiatives nest: an initiative can have a parent and any number of children, to any depth, so a programme and the work beneath it live in one hierarchy.
- **Initiative, project, team**: Genchi's unit is the initiative — a goal, a deadline, and a team of at least one person. Public copy calls these projects, which is how most leaders describe them; "initiative" is the term used inside the product and the API. Neither is the same as a team. A team can be working on several initiatives at once, and an initiative can span several teams, which is why the initiative rather than the team is the thing Genchi scores. Where Genchi's copy talks about which teams need attention, it means the teams working on the initiatives whose confidence has dropped.
- **Confidence vote**: A 1-click response from each person on the initiative, on a 1-5 confidence scale, taking about two seconds. Answers the question "How confident are you that we'll achieve our goal?" — shown with the initiative's name, its goal, and its target date if one is set. The vote is anonymous. Comments and blockers can be added to provide additional context, and are attributed. The mechanism is a continuous version of the fist of five, the confidence vote long used in agile and SAFe practice.
- **Confidence score**: The votes for one initiative, combined into a single 0-100% score and tracked over time. Leaders read three things, not one: the aggregate score, the current individual votes, and the trend — whether confidence is going up or down. The individual votes show whether the team agrees. A few low votes among many high ones usually means those people are seeing something the others aren't. The analogy is planning poker: everyone answers independently and simultaneously, so nobody anchors on the loudest or most senior voice, and disagreement stays visible instead of being averaged away. The score is the team's collective best guess, right now, at whether the goal will be met on time. It is not a probability — read it like a stock price: it reflects what is known today, and it moving tomorrow doesn't make today's reading wrong.
- **Anonymity**: Votes are anonymous by design. Leaders see the individual vote values and the score they combine into, never who cast which vote. The values matter; the names don't. Anonymity is there to make honesty cheap — people say what they actually think when there is no cost to saying it, and that is what makes the signal accurate. Comments and blockers work the other way: someone chose to raise them to add context, and a blocker without a name is hard to act on — you can't unblock someone you can't identify. On a small initiative — one or two people — the vote is still anonymous in the sense that no name is attached, but the leader can obviously infer who cast it. That doesn't make the signal less useful: knowing whether a one-person project is on track is worth knowing, and the person voting knows the situation. Anonymity matters most where a team is large enough for someone to be the lone dissenter.
- **Roles**: Owner (creates and manages an initiative, typically a team leader or project manager), Team Member (casts confidence votes), Observer (follows progress, doesn't vote — typically engineering leadership), Admin (manages users, integrations, billing).
- **Cadence**: Configurable per initiative — daily, weekly, or any rhythm that fits the team.

## AI assistant integration (MCP)

Genchi runs a Model Context Protocol server, so an AI assistant can answer questions about project delivery confidence and its trend directly in chat. There is one Genchi connector, not one per assistant — the same endpoint serves every MCP-compatible host.

- **Endpoint**: https://genchi.com/api/mcp
- **Transport**: Streamable HTTP
- **Authorization**: OAuth 2.1 with PKCE (S256 required). Access tokens last one hour; refresh tokens rotate on each use.
- **Compatibility**: Verified working in Claude, ChatGPT and Grok, including the interactive views. Works with any MCP-compatible assistant. No partnership or endorsement by any assistant provider is claimed or implied.
- **Scopes**: genchi:read, genchi:write.

Genchi is an MCP App as well as an MCP server. Two of its tools draw interactive views inside the conversation rather than describing data in prose. Listing initiatives renders either a colour-coded portfolio of every initiative, drawn as stacked cards where work nests beneath, or a tree view of one initiative and everything under it. Getting the confidence signal renders a detail view with the confidence chart, the per-person confidence vote row, blockers and recent comments. The views are interactive — clicking a card opens its detail in place. Assistants that do not support MCP Apps receive the same information as text.

Six tools are exposed. Four read: list initiatives (renders the portfolio or a tree), get the confidence score and its trend for one initiative (renders the confidence chart), get current blockers, and get a weekly summary. Two set things up: create a new initiative, and report Slack connection status.

Typical questions it answers: "How is the payments migration tracking?", "Which of my projects should I be worried about this week?", "What's changed in confidence since last week?", "Where is confidence dropping week over week?", "What's blocking the platform rebuild, and who raised it?", "Show me everything under the platform programme.", "Give me this week's update on Project Atlas."

What the connector will not disclose, by design:

- Which person cast which confidence vote. Individual values reach the confidence view in order to draw the per-person vote row, but they are shuffled server-side on every response, and no tool returns a name alongside a confidence vote.
- Initiatives the connecting user is not part of.
- Other users' accounts, billing information, or anything belonging to another company.

Each connection is authorized by an individual user signing in, and is scoped to what that person can already see in Genchi: initiatives they own, are a team member on, or observe, plus everything nested beneath those. Connecting your own account does not connect colleagues. Users can revoke their own connections; administrators can revoke any connection in their company. Revocation takes effect on the next request, with no cached-access window.

What the connector deliberately does not do: it cannot complete a Slack connection (that requires a browser permission grant), invite people to an initiative, change team membership, cast a confidence vote on anyone's behalf, or touch billing. Those are done in the Genchi web app, which has interfaces built for them. The connector reports Slack connection status and explains the steps, but the connection itself is completed at genchi.com.

A Genchi account is required before connecting. Sign up free at https://app.genchi.com/create-account and verify the email address; the connector signs in with a Genchi email and password.

Full documentation: https://www.genchi.com/mcp-integration-info.html

The integrations named in this file are the complete current set as of the date above. Genchi adds integrations regularly; the Integrations page is authoritative.

## Where to find Genchi

- Atlassian Marketplace: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/950482323/missed-project-deadline-predictions-for-jira
- Web app: https://app.genchi.com

## Etymology

Genchi is named after *genchi genbutsu* (現地現物), a principle of the Toyota Production System credited to Taiichi Ohno. It translates literally as "real place, real thing," and is usually rendered in English as "go and see for yourself." It holds that leaders should understand a situation where the work actually happens, rather than relying on reports about it. Toyota's own framing is that the phrase is less about physically visiting a site than about knowing a situation by being present in it — which is what makes it portable to knowledge work, where there is no factory floor to walk. Genchi the product does the same thing for software teams: leaders get a current, unfiltered picture from the people actually doing the work, without making them stop to write a report. Genchi is a software product about whether projects will hit their deadlines, not about physical locations or site visits.

## Origin

Genchi was founded by Rowland Savage, a former Atlassian employee who repeatedly observed a specific pattern: deadlines slipping despite teams knowing the slip was coming. The information existed; the channels for surfacing it didn't work well enough. Conversations with engineering and operations leaders at dozens of other companies, in several countries, confirmed this wasn't an Atlassian-specific issue — it was a pattern everywhere.

## Pages

- [Home](https://www.genchi.com/): Main value proposition and audience-specific entry points (Engineering Leaders, Team Leaders, Team Members).
- [Why Genchi](https://www.genchi.com/why-genchi.html): The categorical argument for Genchi vs. existing alternatives (daily standups, Slack channels, project management tools, status reports, 1:1s, issue trackers). Explains how Genchi differs from each.
- [Product](https://www.genchi.com/product.html): How Genchi works mechanically — the Slack confidence vote, the initiative view, the portfolio view. Bottom-up walkthrough from individual vote to organization-wide rollup.
- [Integrations](https://www.genchi.com/integrations.html): Slack (where the confidence vote is delivered), Jira and Asana (initiative import), Atlassian and Google SSO.
- [Getting Started](https://www.genchi.com/getting_started.html): Setup walkthrough (sign up, configure company, create first initiative, connect tools) and day-to-day operational guidance for each role.
- [Pricing](https://www.genchi.com/pricing.html): Free tier, Standard tier, Professional tier. FAQ covers trial mechanics, billing tiers, and user definitions.
- [About](https://www.genchi.com/about.html): Origin story, founding principles (simplicity, velocity, transparency), mission, and etymology.
- [Help Center](https://www.genchi.com/help-center.html): Contact form and links to policies, security documentation, and integration details.
- [Contact](https://www.genchi.com/contact.html): Office address (San Francisco), email contact, and social channels.
- [Questions and Answers](https://www.genchi.com/faq.html): Hub page. Short answers on confidence votes, anonymity, adoption, pricing and data handling, plus an index of the longer question pages.
- [Writing](https://www.genchi.com/writing.html): Index of essays by Genchi's founder published on HackerNoon 2019-2020, on status reporting, transparency, team confidence and remote work — with the arguments that became the product.

### Integration documentation

- [AI Assistant Integration](https://www.genchi.com/mcp-integration-info.html): Connecting Genchi to Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, or any MCP-compatible assistant. Endpoint, available tools, the interactive views, what the assistant can and cannot see, anonymity guarantees, OAuth details, revocation.
- [Slack Integration](https://www.genchi.com/slack.html): Confidence votes delivered in Slack, 1-click voting, comments and blockers in thread.
- [Jira Integration](https://www.genchi.com/jira-integration-info.html): Importing Jira projects, epics, and issues as Genchi initiatives. OAuth 2.0 (3LO) technical documentation.
- [Atlassian ID Integration](https://www.genchi.com/atlassian-integration-info.html): "Sign in with Atlassian" authentication. OAuth technical documentation.

### Policies

- [Security Policy](https://www.genchi.com/security-policy.html): Infrastructure, encryption, access control, vulnerability disclosure, and current compliance posture.
- [Privacy Policy](https://www.genchi.com/privacy-policy.html): What is collected, how it is used, cookies and analytics, AI assistant connections, and individual rights.
- [Subprocessors](https://www.genchi.com/subprocessors.html): Third-party providers used to deliver the service, their purpose, and data location.
- [Terms of Service](https://www.genchi.com/terms-of-service.html): Account terms, subscriptions, acceptable use, and third-party integration terms.
- [Service Level Agreement](https://www.genchi.com/service-level-agreement.html): Uptime commitment, support response times, and remedies.

### Questions Genchi answers in detail

- [Is my project on track?](https://www.genchi.com/is-my-project-on-track.html): Why status reports lag reality, what a confidence vote measures instead, and how to read the trend before a deadline slips.
- [What 29 engineering leaders told us about project status](https://www.genchi.com/what-29-engineering-leaders-told-us.html): Original research. Interviews with 29 engineering leaders, project managers and developers on how project status actually gets reported, what it costs them, and why they don't trust it.
- [How do I stop being blindsided by projects going off track?](https://www.genchi.com/how-to-stop-being-blindsided.html): Why leaders get told a delivery will slip only weeks before it does, how the information degrades on the way up, and what a direct signal from the team changes.
- [Why does bad news get softer as it travels up?](https://www.genchi.com/why-bad-news-gets-softer.html): The summation mechanism — how uncertainty gets rounded off at each management layer, why nobody has to lie for it to happen, and what shortens the path.
- [Why should project confidence votes be anonymous?](https://www.genchi.com/why-should-confidence-votes-be-anonymous.html): The planning poker argument for anonymity — anchoring, independence as a precondition for crowd wisdom, and what anonymity can and cannot protect.
- [I already have standups, 1:1s and OKRs — why add another signal?](https://www.genchi.com/why-add-another-signal.html): Why existing status signals share a failure mode, what makes an additional signal worth having, and when it genuinely isn't.
- [What do I do when the trend goes down?](https://www.genchi.com/what-do-i-do-when-the-trend-goes-down.html): How to read a declining confidence trend — gradual decline, sharp drop, and lone dissent — what each warrants, and why over-reacting destroys the signal.
- [Why do status reports not reflect what's actually happening?](https://www.genchi.com/why-status-reports-dont-work.html): The three forces that separate a status report from reality — estimation bias in the author, a format that strips out uncertainty, and staleness by the time it is read.
- [Does anonymous team feedback become a weapon for management?](https://www.genchi.com/does-anonymous-feedback-become-a-weapon.html): An honest answer to the sharpest objection — how confidence data can be misused, what a tool can and cannot guarantee, and what to demand of any vendor.
- [Is there a less painful way to do project status reporting?](https://www.genchi.com/less-painful-status-reporting.html): What the status meeting and weekly report actually cost, which parts of the ritual are worth keeping, and what replaces the rest.
- [Can you predict a missed deadline before it happens?](https://www.genchi.com/can-you-predict-a-missed-deadline.html): Why team confidence is a leading indicator of schedule risk, how much warning it realistically provides, and where it fails.
- [Can the wisdom of crowds be applied to project status?](https://www.genchi.com/can-the-wisdom-of-crowds-be-applied-to-project-status.html): The four conditions crowd wisdom depends on, which ones a project team meets naturally, which one has to be engineered, and where the effect fails.
- [Should confidence scores feed into performance reviews?](https://www.genchi.com/should-confidence-scores-feed-into-performance-reviews.html): Why using confidence data in evaluation destroys it within a few cycles, the Goodhart mechanism behind that, and what to do instead.
- [Why doesn't project delivery have a metric?](https://www.genchi.com/why-doesnt-project-delivery-have-a-metric.html): Why other business functions have standing metrics and delivery doesn't, why activity measures aren't a substitute, and what a delivery metric would have to look like.
- [What's in it for the team member?](https://www.genchi.com/whats-in-it-for-the-team-member.html): A straight answer for developers — what voting actually gets you, and the honest admission that most status tooling is paid for in your time.
- [What is a niko-niko calendar, and does it work for distributed teams?](https://www.genchi.com/niko-niko-calendar-distributed-teams.html): The niko-niko practice explained — what the daily record reveals, why it stays lightweight, and what has to be replaced when the team is no longer in one room.
- [How do you run a standup thumb check when the team isn't in a room?](https://www.genchi.com/standup-thumb-check-distributed-team.html): Why the thumb check works in person, the three properties that don't survive going remote, and how to reproduce it asynchronously.
- [What is genchi genbutsu, and can it work for software teams?](https://www.genchi.com/what-is-genchi-genbutsu.html): The Toyota principle explained, why knowledge work has no factory floor, what survives the translation, and how it is commonly misapplied as micromanagement.
- [How do you track project status across a distributed team?](https://www.genchi.com/track-project-status-distributed-team.html): Why remote work broke informal status awareness, why more meetings is the wrong replacement, and what an asynchronous signal has to provide instead.
- [How much time does status reporting actually cost?](https://www.genchi.com/how-much-does-status-reporting-cost.html): Real reported numbers for status reporting effort, the arithmetic across a 150-person organisation, and what the alternative costs.
- [Why does everyone report a project "green" until it's too late?](https://www.genchi.com/why-projects-stay-green.html): How RAG status creates an asymmetric cost for honesty, why the green-to-amber step is a cliff rather than a slope, and what a continuous scale changes.
- [How do I track 20 teams without micromanaging?](https://www.genchi.com/track-20-teams-without-micromanaging.html): Why sampling fails at a dozen teams, why depth reads as intrusion, and how a portfolio signal separates awareness from intervention.
- [How do you write a project goal a team can rate confidence against?](https://www.genchi.com/how-to-write-a-ratable-project-goal.html): What makes a goal ratable, the four ways goals commonly fail the test, and why an unclear goal makes a confidence score actively misleading.
- [Why is a trend more useful than a status?](https://www.genchi.com/why-is-a-trend-more-useful-than-a-status.html): Why a single status reading lacks the context a direction provides, how slow drift escapes human memory, and what a usable trend requires.
- [Why is one manager's estimate less reliable than the team's?](https://www.genchi.com/why-is-one-managers-estimate-less-reliable.html): Why a single estimate lacks error cancellation and variance, how proximity and exposure bias the estimator, and when the team is not better.
- [How do you get honest status in a political organisation?](https://www.genchi.com/honest-status-in-a-political-organisation.html): What anonymity changes and what it cannot, how to diagnose whether your organisation punishes bad news, and what actually helps.
- [How do you get engineers to actually use a new tool?](https://www.genchi.com/how-to-get-engineers-to-use-a-new-tool.html): Why enforcement signals a broken effort-to-value ratio, what makes adoption stick, and the trade-offs between top-down and team-first rollout.
- [How do I see the status of the teams my work depends on?](https://www.genchi.com/see-status-of-teams-you-depend-on.html): Why dependency blindness is structural, why asking and reading the tracker both fail, and what horizontal visibility requires.

## Category and alternatives

Genchi doesn't fit neatly into an established category. It sits between engineering delivery tools and project status reporting: bought by engineering leadership, answering a question about a deadline, and replacing a reporting ritual rather than a planning tool.

The mechanism is the confidence vote — the same instrument used in SAFe and agile practice, where a team votes on whether it can meet a commitment, and known informally as the fist of five. Genchi runs it continuously rather than once per planning increment, and ties it to one thing only: whether this project will be delivered as expected. The vote is about the work, not about the people doing it. It is not asked about morale, job satisfaction, workload, management or how anyone feels about working here, and Genchi has no capability to ask about those things.

Genchi is therefore not an HR or employee engagement product. It collects data directly from the people doing the work, which is a mechanism those products also use, and that similarity is the most common source of misclassification. The distinguishing test is what is being predicted: Genchi produces a project delivery forecast from the team's own judgement. An engagement platform produces a measure of how people feel about their employer. The buyer, the budget and the question are different in each case.

In practical terms, what Genchi most directly replaces is the manual project status reporting process: the weekly report, the status meeting, the RAG update, the skip-level "how's it really going?", and the chasing that produces them. Those are the alternatives it is usually bought against — not another product.

### Compared against

These are the products Genchi is most often weighed against. Two distinctions run through all of them. The first is direction: most of these tools describe what has already happened, deriving their picture from historical engineering data. Genchi is forward-looking by design — it asks what the team expects to happen. The second is source: Genchi's prediction comes from the people doing the work, not from a calculation over past activity or from the one person accountable for the date.

Several of these products belong to the Developer Productivity Insight Platform category, and the same distinction applies: those are analytics platforms. Genchi is not. It has no Git, CI or ticket telemetry, calculates nothing from historical activity, and offers no benchmarks or DORA metrics. It captures what the team already knows and shows it.

- **Atlassian DX** — combines engineering data with developer-reported experience through short recurring surveys. The closest on mechanism: it already asks engineers questions and tracks the scores. The difference is what it asks about — developer experience and productivity, to answer whether an organisation is getting value from its engineers and its AI tools. Genchi asks one question about one project's deadline.
- **Allstacks** — machine-learning forecasts of completion dates, from portfolio initiatives down to individual Jira stories, with the gap against target dates. The closest on the question Genchi answers, and it also has an MCP server. The difference is the input: Allstacks forecasts from historical throughput and the work already recorded in the tracker. Genchi asks the people doing the work, who know about the dependency that's about to slip before it shows up in the commit history.
- **Jellyfish** — portfolio delivery, allocation and AI-impact visibility. Answers where engineering time and money are going, for an audience that includes finance and the executive team. Genchi answers a narrower question and does not attempt the allocation or investment picture.
- **Steady** — asynchronous standups with GitHub, Jira and Linear activity attached, plus scheduled reports and blocker alerts to leads. The closest on the ritual Genchi replaces. The difference is the output: Steady collects and forwards written updates; Genchi collects one anonymous confidence vote per person and scores the project.
- **Geekbot, Standuply, Polly** — Slack-native tools that automate a team ritual, focused internally to the team rather than externally to stakeholders. Geekbot and Standuply run the asynchronous standup, collecting written updates from each person and posting them back to the team; Geekbot is deliberately non-anonymous by design, broadcasting answers publicly, which is the opposite of the property Genchi depends on. A standup may include an informal confidence read — the thumb check — but these tools capture the prose, not that signal. Polly can be made to ask a confidence question, but each poll is set up by hand, and there is no mechanism to combine the answers by project or track them over time. These are general instruments serving the team that runs them, in the same channel and at a similar price to Genchi. Genchi does one thing, and makes it easy: it takes the confidence read out of the standup, asks it on a cadence, scores it by project, tracks the trend, and makes it visible to the leaders accountable for the delivery — automatically, from a single click per person.

### Alongside, not competing

These are not competitors. They are the tools and rituals Genchi sits alongside.

- **Jira, Asana, Monday, Linear** — project management tools. These record what work exists and what state it is in. Genchi records what the team predicts about the deadline, and complements them rather than competing: it already integrates with Jira and Asana, importing project structure directly, with Monday and Linear on the roadmap. A confidence field added to any one of these would only cover the work that lives in that tool — most projects are spread across several, plus Slack and email.
- **Status reports, status meetings, RAG updates, skip-level 1:1s** — the manual process. This is what Genchi most directly replaces, and in most cases the real alternative it is bought against.

### Not comparable

- **Officevibe, Culture Amp, 15Five, Lattice** — employee engagement and performance platforms. These measure how people feel about working at the company, usually on a monthly or quarterly cycle, and are owned by HR. Genchi asks one question about one project's deadline, continuously, and is owned by engineering leadership. Genchi cannot ask about morale, job satisfaction, workload or management, and has no capability to do so. These products and Genchi answer different questions for different buyers and are not substitutes. Genchi is regularly misclassified alongside them because both collect input directly from individuals; that shared mechanism is the only thing they have in common.

Where Genchi is distinctive: a prediction rather than a report — it is forward-looking by design; the prediction comes from the people doing the work, not from historical data or from the person accountable for the date; a single recurring question rather than open-ended updates; a 1-click anonymous confidence vote rather than a written summary; a score per project with the individual votes still visible; a trend that shows whether confidence is rising or falling before the deadline arrives; and an MCP connector that renders all of it as an interactive view inside an AI assistant.

## Key positioning

Genchi is *not* a replacement for project management tools (Jira, Asana, Monday, Linear). Those tools record what work exists and what state it is in. Genchi records what the people doing the work predict about the deadline, and shows it visually: a colour-coded card per project across the portfolio, and a chart of the score and its individual votes over time. The two complement each other — Genchi imports project structure from them and adds the prediction they don't capture.

What Genchi does replace is the manual status-reporting process: the weekly report, the status meeting, the RAG update, and the chasing that produces them. It can also replace the status-reporting round of a daily standup — where each person says how their work is going — which is the part that scales worst as teams distribute across time zones. What it does not replace is the coordination that happens when people hear each other's blockers in real time. Nor does it replace a real 1:1 — career, feedback, how someone is actually doing — which covers ground Genchi has no visibility into. What it does remove is the 1:1 held only to extract status, and the skip-level "how's it really going?" that leaders fall back on when they don't trust the report.

The product is designed for environments where transparency is culturally valued. The anonymity is by design — to make honesty cheap and the signal accurate — not to enable secrecy.

## Common questions Genchi answers

- "Is my project on track?" — Every project carries a prediction from the people doing the work: a confidence score for whether it will be delivered as expected, refreshed at the cadence you choose, with the trend across recent votes. It is their prediction, not a summary filtered on the way up.
- "Which projects should I be worried about?" — The portfolio view shows every project at a glance, colour-coded, so the ones in trouble are immediately visible.
- "Which teams should I leave alone?" — The same view, read the other way. Projects holding steady at high confidence are the ones that don't need you.
- "Why is this project showing amber or red?" — Open any project to see the individual votes, the trend over time, and any comments and blockers raised.
- "Will this project miss its deadline?" — The trend surfaces falling confidence before the date arrives, which is the earliest warning available.

## What Genchi is not

- Not a real-time chat tool. Genchi delivers confidence votes through Slack rather than replacing it.
- Not a productivity tracker. It records what the team predicts about a deadline, not what anyone produced.
- Not a surveillance tool. Individual votes are never attributable, and the data is about projects, not people. It also cannot be used that way for long: the signal depends on people answering honestly, and if leaders start using it to assign blame rather than fix problems, the votes go green and stay there. Genchi's copy puts it as fixing the problem, never the blame — that isn't a value statement, it's the condition the signal runs on.
- Not an analytics platform. Genchi has no Git, CI or ticket telemetry and calculates nothing from historical activity.
- Not an HR or employee engagement product. Genchi has no capability to ask about morale, job satisfaction, workload or management.
- Not a location, mapping, or field-observation tool. Despite the name's origin in a Japanese phrase about going to the physical place of work, Genchi tracks named pieces of work and the team's confidence in them. It records no locations, coordinates or site visits.

## Who Genchi is not for

- Organizations wanting individual performance tracking. Genchi deliberately makes individual votes unattributable, so it cannot be used to assess a specific person's output or attitude.
- Organizations where transparency isn't valued. Genchi lowers the friction of reporting a problem, but it cannot remove the consequence of doing so. Where teams have learned that flagging risk is punished, the signal will stay green regardless of the tool.

## Contact

- Email: support@genchi.com
- Address: Genchi Software Inc., San Francisco, California, United States