Why Genchi exists
I spent years at Atlassian — a company that exceptionally and famously values transparency, running high-pressure projects with strong tooling and disciplined teams.
Even there, I kept seeing the same pattern. A deadline would slip, and when investigated, it would turn out the team had known the slip was coming for some time. That insight just wasn't effectively communicated upward. The information was there; the channels for surfacing it didn't work well enough.
Genchi started from that observation. Conversations with engineering and operations leaders at dozens of other companies confirmed it wasn't an Atlassian problem — it was a pattern everywhere. Existing tools weren't built to surface what teams already know. So I built one that was.
Three principles guided what got built — and what didn't: simplicity, velocity, transparency.
Simplicity
Our lives, working lives in particular, have gotten ever more complex. Some complexity is unavoidable — but we should limit it where we can.
Genchi reduces the complexity of managing projects, rather than adding to it as so many existing tools do.
Velocity
Projects move faster than they used to. Teams are more distributed than they used to be. The rituals built to track work haven't kept up — and by the time leadership sees the picture, the picture has moved.
Status should always be current and always available.
Transparency
A lot of friction can be avoided by getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Despite more flexible tools and processes, information is still trapped in disparate systems and silos.
Anyone involved with — or dependent on — a project outcome should know how that project is doing, and be able to plan accordingly.
Our mission is to make it easier for all teams to achieve better outcomes. These principles guide how we pursue it.