Questions and answers

How long does a check-in take?

About two seconds. A prompt arrives in Slack, email or the app asking one question — how confident are you that we'll achieve our goal? — 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. The aggregate is calculated from the people who did respond, and the initiative shows how many that was. There's no chasing, no reminder escalation, and no per-person participation tracking — that data isn't collected.

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

Usually. Seventy per cent is enough for aggregation and enough for a trend, provided broadly the same people respond each time, so the series stays comparable. The risk is if the non-responders are systematically the people with concerns, which would bias the reading upward. A falling response rate is itself informative — it usually means the team has concluded nobody acts on it.

How do you avoid check-in 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 check in 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 check-in goes out on the schedule you set. There's no sales call and no implementation project.

Do team members need an account?

Not to participate. People invited through Slack can respond to check-ins without registering. An account gets them the dashboards, the trends and the view of other teams — but it isn't required to answer.

How do I get project status without adding another meeting?

That's the intended use. The check-in 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. Individual responses are aggregated on Genchi's servers before any response reaches an interface, an export or an integration. The aggregate and the spread of individual values are visible; which person gave which value isn't retrievable by any user, including administrators.

Anonymity is a property of aggregation, so it needs numbers: meaningful from around five people, robust from about eight, and weak on a team of three. We'd rather say that than claim otherwise.

Are comments and blockers anonymous too?

No, deliberately. The score is 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 Genchi holds no per-person data to enable it — no individual view, no 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 or ChatGPT?

Yes. Genchi runs a Model Context Protocol server, so any MCP-compatible assistant can answer questions about initiative status — "how is the payments migration tracking?" Each connection is authorised by an individual user and scoped to what that person can already see. Individual votes are never disclosed through it; only aggregated values. Details on the AI assistant integration page.

What's the smallest team this works for?

Mechanically it works at any size. Meaningfully, aggregation needs about five people — below that the responses are close to identifiable and the average carries little more information than asking. For a team of three who sit together, you probably don't need this.

Does this work for long-horizon projects?

Less well, and it's worth being honest about it. Confidence about something eighteen months out is weakly informative, because nobody has met the evidence yet — it tends to stay high until it collapses. The fix is to track shorter milestones with real success conditions, with the long-horizon goal as a parent initiative above them.

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?

Free for teams of one to ten, ongoing, with no credit card required. For eleven or more it's $0.80 per user per month, billed in 25-user increments, with a 14-day free trial. A Professional tier at $1.20 per user per month with additional reporting is planned but not yet available. Full detail on the pricing page.

What counts as a user?

An account you've activated and that appears in your user management screen. People who only respond to check-ins through Slack, without registering, aren't counted.