Why Genchi?
In today's hybrid and remote world, even with all your tools and processes, you're still coming up short, dealing with missed deadlines and last-minute scrambles far too often.
How does it work?
Step 1: The regular individual confidence vote
Over Slack or email, each confidence vote takes one click, about two seconds.
Answer one question on a scale of 1–5: "How confident are you the team will achieve their goal by the deadline?"
An optional (attributed) comment can also be included to add context or flag blockers.
Step 2: The project-level picture emerges
Individual answers are combined into a current, color-coded card for the project: the wisdom of crowds in action.
Individual vote values are visible, but anonymous, to encourage unfiltered honesty.
The team's collective prediction is clear, and the individual data points that form it are visible too.
Step 3: Entire portfolio of projects, all visible at a glance
Engineering leaders and observers see a dashboard of all their projects: color-coded, current, with the trend tracked over time.
Drill in with a mouse click to see more details and trends, so help can be brought in before the fire drill, not after.
Comments and blockers are curated by project to provide context, maximizing signal, minimizing noise.
I have a lot of signals. Why will this one be different?
Because your existing tools and processes make it hard to see the current status of all your projects, let alone predict which ones will miss their deadlines.
Daily standups
Good for: knowing what's happening today, who's blocked right now.
But: the team's status isn't shared or easily visible to other teams or Engineering Leadership.
Slack / chat channels
Good for: real-time chatter, ad-hoc questions, broad visibility into team activity.
But: status isn't consistently captured; the signal drowns in noise, so you have to hunt for it.
Project management tools (Asana, Monday, Smartsheet, Microsoft Project)
Good for: managing timelines, milestones, dependencies, and resource planning.
But: status updates are often stale and lose fidelity when filtered by the PM for upward consumption.
Status Reports
Good for: communicating a shared understanding, when done right.
But: they rarely show the real picture: the all-too-common watermelon status report. Time-consuming to produce and usually over-optimistic, they become stale the day after publishing.
1:1s and walking-the-floor
Good for: depth, trust, and surfacing what's not in writing.
But: limited to one person's perspective at a time; the best option here, but time-consuming and hard to scale.
Issue trackers (JIRA, Linear, GitHub Issues)
Good for: tracking tasks and their workflows, work-in-progress, and what's been shipped.
But: the real status of in-progress items is opaque; there's no prediction of whether it'll ship on time.
Genchi is different.
Genchi takes the ease of a regular standup "thumb check" but makes it visible to other teams and engineering leadership. It provides transparency into projects in progress, showing how confident the team is that each one will be delivered on time and to the agreed scope: a prediction, not a report of what's already happened. It's much lighter than PM tools, and more accurate than traditional reports; the prediction comes from the entire team, not a filtered summary by the PM.
Comparing specific tools? See Genchi vs manual status reports, Steady, Geekbot, Standuply, Range, Polly, async standup bots, Allstacks, LinearB, Jellyfish and Atlassian DX.
Why Genchi, by role?
Be heard without making it a thing.
A regular 1-click confidence vote via Slack or email. In return, you see how your team and the teams you depend on are doing. And if you're getting worried, this is a channel that goes somewhere. Anonymously. It's the easiest way to flag what's worrying you, while there's still time to do something about it.
Know what the team isn't saying.
The team's confidence votes become a living, collaborative project delivery prediction: current, color-coded and straight from the horse's mouth. You see the collective read and the individual data points, so you know when one person is seeing something the rest aren't. Lean in when it matters. Leave the team alone when it doesn't.
Spot smoldering fires across all your teams.
See every project in your portfolio, color-coded and current, at a glance. The picture is comprehensive because every team member contributes; it's lightweight because each contribution takes two seconds. So you see trouble as it manifests, while there's still time to affect the outcome, and know which teams to leave alone.
One last thing: the name isn't decorative.
Genchi comes from genchi genbutsu, "go and see for yourself." It's the Toyota Production System principle that acknowledges that reality is often not reflected in a summary report; you have to go and see the work itself.
Status reports are fragmented, stale and scattered. Genchi makes it as easy as possible to capture a regular prediction from the entire team: what the people doing the work believe is going to happen, which is the earliest, most accurate signal you can get. Does asking the team actually work? →
One precondition: Genchi works best where transparency is valued, or genuinely aspired to. The anonymity is by design, to reduce friction and encourage candor. Comments and blockers are attributed, so someone can follow up. We help you fix the problem, never the blame.
START FREE TRIAL2-week free trial. Teams of up to 10 stay free; larger teams pay $2.50/user/month for every billed user (~$250/month for a 100-person org). No credit card to start.