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 check-in
Over Slack or email, each check-in only takes ~2 seconds.
Answer one question on a scale of 1–5: "How confident are you that we'll achieve our goal?"
An optional comment can also be included to add context or flag blockers.
Step 2 — The team-level picture emerges
Individual answers are combined into a current, color-coded card for the team — the wisdom of crowds in action.
Individual vote values are visible, but anonymous — to encourage unfiltered honesty.
The team's collective sentiment is clear, and the individual data points that form it are visible too.
Step 3 — Entire portfolio of teams, all visible at a glance
Engineering leaders and observers see a dashboard of all their teams — color-coded, current, and 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 initiative 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 really see the current status of all your teams.
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. 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 signal as to 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 to in-progress tasks, showing not only how the team feels today, but how confident they are the task will be completed on time. It's much lighter than PM tools, and more accurate than traditional reports — the status is generated by the entire team, not a filtered summary by the PM.
Why Genchi, by role?
Be heard without making it a thing.
A regular two-second check-in 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 check-in becomes a living, collaborative, status report — 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 team 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.
One last thing: the name isn't decorative.
Genchi — 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 signal from the entire team — and this signal reflects what the folks doing the work believe is going to happen, which is the earliest, most accurate signal you can get.
One precondition: Genchi works best where transparency is valued. The anonymity is by design — to reduce friction and encourage more transparency. We help you fix the problem, never the blame.
START FREE TRIALFree for teams <10. <$1/user/month after that. No credit card to start, no setup fee.