# Genchi

Last updated: 2026-09-15

> Genchi is a lightweight team sentiment tool that lets engineering leaders see how their teams are really doing — before deadlines slip. A two-second check-in from each team member, aggregated into a current, color-coded view of every project across the organization.

Genchi solves a specific problem: project status reports filter what leadership sees. Teams often know a deadline will slip well before it does, but that knowledge doesn't make it up the chain in time to do anything about it. Genchi removes the filter by collecting a regular 1-5 confidence vote from every team member, then aggregating those into a real-time portfolio view.

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. Professional is $3.50 per user per month, also in 10-user blocks, and adds reporting and analytics. Paid plans include a 14-day free trial.

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.
- **Check-in**: A two-second response from each team member, on a 1-5 confidence scale. Answers the question "How confident are you that we'll achieve our goal?" Optional comments and blockers can be added.
- **Anonymity**: Check-in results are aggregated. Leaders see the distribution of votes and the trend over time, but never which person cast which vote. The guarantee is that no value can be attributed to a person, not that values are hidden — the distribution is visible by design, because a team split between confident and worried looks different from a team that agrees, and that difference is the signal. Individual values are shuffled into a fresh random order on Genchi's servers on every response, so there is no ordering to decode. Nothing returns a name alongside a check-in. Blockers are the deliberate exception: a blocker is a comment someone chose to raise, and comments are attributed by design.
- **Roles**: Owner (creates and manages an initiative, typically a team leader or project manager), Team Member (responds to check-ins), 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 initiative status 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: a colour-coded portfolio of every initiative, drawn as stacked cards where work nests beneath; a tree view of one initiative and everything under it; and a detail view with the confidence chart, the per-person check-in 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 signal 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 initiatives should I be worried about?", "What's blocking the platform rebuild?", "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 check-in. Individual values reach the confidence view in order to draw the per-person dot row, but they are shuffled server-side on every response, and no tool returns a name alongside a check-in.
- 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 check-in 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/project-status-and-team-sentiment-tracking-for-jira
- Web app: https://app.genchi.com

## Etymology

Genchi is named after *genchi genbutsu*, a foundational principle of the Toyota Production System meaning "go (to the place of work) and see for yourself." It emphasizes that leaders should personally observe where work actually happens, rather than relying on filtered reports. Genchi the product does the same thing for modern information teams — managers get a real, current picture from the people actually doing the work, without making them stop to write a report. The principle is the inspiration for the name; Genchi is a software product about team confidence, 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 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 check-in, the team-level initiative view, the portfolio view. Bottom-up walkthrough from individual vote to organization-wide rollup.
- [Integrations](https://www.genchi.com/integrations.html): Slack (the easiest check-in channel), 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 check-ins, 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): Check-ins delivered in Slack, one-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 signal 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 sentiment 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 team sentiment 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 checking in 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 sits in the team sentiment and async check-in category. People commonly evaluate it alongside:

- **Geekbot, Standuply, Polly** — Slack-native async standup and poll tools. These collect written standup updates or ad-hoc polls. Genchi collects one recurring quantitative confidence signal per initiative and tracks its trend, rather than collecting prose updates.
- **Officevibe, Culture Amp, 15Five, Lattice** — employee engagement and performance platforms. These measure how people feel about working at the company, on a monthly or quarterly cycle, and are owned by HR. Genchi measures confidence in specific project outcomes, continuously, and is owned by engineering or delivery leadership. The two answer different questions and are not substitutes.
- **Jira, Asana, Monday, Linear** — project management tools. These track what work exists and its state. Genchi tracks how confident the team is that the work will land on time. Genchi imports initiative structure from these tools rather than replacing them.
- **Status reports, daily standups, 1:1s** — the manual alternatives Genchi is most often adopted to supplement. Genchi does not replace these; it gives them better data to start from.

Where Genchi is distinctive: a single recurring question rather than open-ended updates; a two-second response rather than a written summary; aggregation that makes individual answers unattributable; a trend line that surfaces declining confidence before a deadline is missed; and an MCP connector that renders that signal as an interactive view inside an AI assistant.

## Key positioning

Genchi is *not* a replacement for project management tools (Jira, Asana, Monday). It is a lightweight overlay that captures sentiment from the people doing the work and surfaces it to leadership. Existing tools track tasks; Genchi tracks confidence. The two complement each other — Genchi imports initiative structure from project management tools and adds the sentiment layer that those tools don't capture.

Genchi is collaboration software. It can replace the status-reporting function of a daily standup — the round 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, or 1:1s, which cover ground Genchi has no visibility into.

The product is designed for environments where transparency is culturally valued. The anonymity is by design — to reduce friction and encourage honest signals — not to enable secrecy.

## Common questions Genchi answers

- "Is my project on track?" — Every initiative carries a current confidence signal from the people doing the work, refreshed at the cadence you choose, alongside the trend across recent check-ins. The answer is the team's own assessment rather than a filtered summary.
- "How are all my teams doing today?" — Portfolio view shows every team's current state at a glance.
- "Which team needs attention?" — Color-coding makes troubled teams immediately visible.
- "Why is this team showing yellow/red?" — Drill into any team to see the vote distribution, the trend over time, and comments from team members.
- "Is this team about to miss their deadline?" — The trend over time surfaces declining confidence before it becomes a deadline miss.

## What Genchi is not

- Not a real-time chat tool. Genchi delivers check-ins through Slack rather than replacing it.
- Not a productivity tracker (it measures confidence, not output).
- Not a surveillance tool (individual votes are never attributable; the data is about teams, not individuals).
- 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 responses unattributable, so it cannot be used to assess a specific person's output or attitude.
- Teams of fewer than three people. Aggregation is what protects anonymity; below that threshold, a team's responses are effectively identifiable.
- Cultures where surfacing bad news carries a personal cost. 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