Questions and answers

How long does a confidence vote take?

About two seconds. A prompt arrives in Slack, email or the app asking one question — how confident are you the team will achieve their goal by the deadline? — answered one to five with a single click. There's no form and no required text. Comments and blockers are optional.

What happens if someone doesn't respond?

Nothing punitive. Voting takes one click and about two seconds — the lowest reporting tax we could design that still produces a useful signal. If someone misses a prompt, Genchi assumes their previous vote still holds and carries it forward. Someone who has never voted appears as a grey marker on the initiative's detail view, and isn't included in any calculation. There's no chasing and no reminder escalation.

Is the signal useful if only 70% of the team responds?

Yes. A missed prompt doesn't leave a gap: each person's previous vote carries forward until they update it, so the score reflects everyone who has voted. The risk runs the other way — a carried-forward vote can go stale if someone's view has changed and they haven't said so. A falling response rate is itself informative: it usually means the team has concluded nobody acts on the result.

How do you avoid voting fatigue?

Mostly by cadence. Daily suits short delivery cycles; weekly suits most teams and is a reasonable default. If people are answering the same value ten days running with nothing changing, the cadence is wrong for that initiative.

Genchi is designed so that answering identically is a legitimate response rather than a failure to engage — a flat line is information. What causes fatigue isn't frequency, it's effort: a two-second click sustains where a two-minute form doesn't.

Can I use Genchi across several teams at once?

Yes. People frequently sit on more than one initiative and vote separately for each. Initiatives can be linked into parent-child structures, so a programme made of several workstreams rolls up rather than appearing as unrelated cards.

How quickly can we set it up?

Under an hour, and usually much less. Sign up, create an initiative with a goal and a deadline, invite the team, connect Slack. Your first confidence vote goes out on the schedule you set. There's no sales call and no implementation project.

Do team members need an account?

Yes. Everyone who votes is added to the initiative as a Genchi user and links their Slack account, which is how the confidence vote reaches them in Slack. After that, voting is one click in Slack. Signing in to the web app adds the dashboards, the trends and the view of other teams.

How do I get project status without adding another meeting?

That's the intended use. The confidence vote replaces the status-reporting portion of a standup or a weekly update rather than sitting alongside it. What stays is the conversation that happens because the signal moved — a meeting with a reason rather than one on a calendar. See is there a less painful way to do status reporting.

Can my manager see how I voted?

No. No screen, export, API or AI assistant connection attaches a name to a vote. Your manager sees the individual values — that's how agreement or disagreement shows — and the combined score, but never which value was yours. Genchi does record who has voted, so one person voting five times can't pass for five people agreeing; that record lives only in the underlying database, which no customer can access. On a small team, a vote can be easy to infer even without a name — we'd rather say that than claim otherwise.

Are comments and blockers anonymous too?

No, deliberately. Votes are anonymous because registering mild doubt should cost nothing. Comments and blockers are attributed, because a blocker needs an owner and someone to follow up with. Adding one is always optional.

Can confidence scores be used in performance reviews?

They shouldn't be, and nothing in Genchi shows votes against people — no view of any one person's votes, no individual history, no participation leaderboard. What a tool can't prevent is a leader treating a team's aggregate as a verdict on that team, which destroys the signal within a couple of cycles. The mechanism is set out in should confidence scores feed into performance reviews.

Where is our data stored?

On AWS in the United States. The full list of third parties that process customer data, and what each receives, is on the subprocessors page. Encryption, access control and vulnerability disclosure are covered in the security policy.

Does Genchi use our data to train AI models?

No. Where a user authorises a connection to a third-party AI assistant, that provider's own policies govern any use it makes of data it receives.

Can I connect Genchi to Claude, ChatGPT or Grok?

Yes. Genchi runs a Model Context Protocol server, so any MCP-compatible assistant can answer questions about project delivery confidence — "how is the payments migration tracking?" Each connection is authorised by an individual user and scoped to what that person can already see. It never attaches a name to a vote: individual values appear only unattributed, alongside the combined score. Details on the AI assistant integration page.

What's the smallest team this works for?

Any size. On a team of one or two, a vote isn't really anonymous — but knowing whether a small project is on track is still worth knowing, especially across a portfolio of them. Anonymity matters most once a team is large enough for someone to be the lone dissenter, from around five people.

Does this work for long-horizon projects?

Yes. Genchi captures the whole team's prediction at every point in a project's life, and tracks it over time. Sometimes the team knows at launch that a project won't meet its goal by the deadline, and Genchi shows that from the first vote. More often, confidence starts high and dips as problems are met and overcome, which is the normal shape of a project. If confidence keeps trending down as the deadline gets closer, that project is a likely candidate for intervention.

Does this work for platform teams?

Yes, and it's arguably more valuable there. Platform work is a step removed from company goals, which makes its status harder to read from the outside, and a platform team's difficulties propagate to every dependent team. The requirement is a ratable goal — "all services on the new cluster, old one decommissioned, by 15 May" rather than "platform improvements."

What if the team doesn't believe in the project?

You'll get a low, flat signal, and that's a real answer rather than a broken one. A team on a death march knows it, and a persistent low reading with no recovery is worth more than the polite version you'd get by asking. What Genchi can't do is tell you why — a low signal is a prompt for a conversation, not a diagnosis.

Why does status reporting need someone to enforce it?

Because people fill in what they believe is read and useful. When a process needs chasing, the people doing it have concluded the effort exceeds the value — and they're usually right. Enforcement treats the symptom, and it produces compliance without content: fields filled with whatever satisfies the check.

What is genchi genbutsu?

A principle from the Toyota Production System, usually translated "go and see for yourself." It instructs managers not to rely on the report but to go where the work happens — walk the line, see where it backs up, notice the equipment that's failing and the conditions that never appear in what gets submitted upward. It's where our name comes from. The software translation is covered in what is genchi genbutsu, and can it work for software teams.

How much does Genchi cost?

Every account starts with a 14-day free trial. After it, teams of one to ten stay free, with no credit card required. Teams of eleven or more pay $2.50 per user per month on Standard, billed in 10-user blocks. Professional, at $3.50 per user per month, adds cross-team portfolio analytics, anonymized participation reporting, data export and API access, an audit log and priority support. Full detail on the pricing page.

What counts as a user?

An account you've activated and that appears in your user management screen. Everyone who votes on an initiative is a user.