Using the Henry panel

The Henry panel is the primary surface for the AI assistant inside Performance Blocks. It is a right-side panel that opens over your current page, lets you chat with Henry while you work, and hosts the guided flows that walk you through structured tasks.

This article covers the full set of behaviors inside the panel — opening it, the chat interface, attachments, citations, sessions and history, keyboard shortcuts, resizing, mobile behavior, and the difference between free-form chat and guided flows.

Plan availability: Henry Agent is available on the Agentic plan. Team plan customers can upgrade in Settings → Billing.

Opening the panel

The panel opens from a button in the top navigation bar. Click it on any page and the panel slides in from the right edge of the window without navigating away from what you were doing.

The panel persists across navigation. If you open it on the dashboard, then click into an employee profile, the panel stays open and your conversation is preserved. The same is true if you open a flow and then move to another page mid-flow — the flow keeps its state.

The panel also remembers whether it was open. If you close the browser with the panel open and return later, it reopens to the same state. If you closed it explicitly, it stays closed until you click to open it again.

The chat interface

The center of the panel is a chat interface. It has three regions:

• Header: shows the current session, a control to start a new session, and a menu for session history.
• Message list: scrollable list of messages between you and Henry, with the most recent at the bottom.
• Composer: a text input at the bottom where you type prompts.

Sending messages

Type into the composer and press Enter to send. Use Shift+Enter to insert a line break without sending. The composer expands as you type to fit your message; very long inputs are accepted but will be truncated visually until you click into them.

Henry typically streams its response, meaning the answer appears word-by-word rather than all at once. This is intentional — it lets you start reading and stop the response if it is heading in the wrong direction.

You can stop a streaming response by clicking the stop button that appears in place of the send button while Henry is responding. Stopping does not delete the partial response; it stays in the message list as-is.

What to type

Henry is more useful when prompts give it something to work with. A few patterns that work well:

• Ask about a specific person: "What did I write about Sara in Q1?" Henry will scope its retrieval to Sara's data.
• Provide a few sentences of raw context: "Marcus ran the postmortem this morning. He led with the customer impact, kept blame out of it, and assigned three follow-ups." This is enough for Henry to draft a structured observation.
• Ask for a specific output shape: "Draft three open-ended questions for my 1:1 with Priya tomorrow, focused on what is blocking her." Telling Henry the format saves a back-and-forth.
• Reference a document: "What does our leveling guide say about the difference between Senior and Staff for the technical track?" If your knowledge base has the document, Henry will pull from it and cite the source.

Henry will ask follow-up questions when your prompt is ambiguous. You can answer in the next message and the conversation continues with full context.

Editing and retrying

You can edit a message you sent by hovering over it and clicking the edit icon. Editing a message replaces it and re-runs Henry's response from that point — earlier messages stay, but everything after the edit is regenerated.

You can also retry Henry's last response without editing your prompt. This is useful when the first answer was reasonable but you want to see another angle.

Attachments

The composer has an attach button that lets you bring files into the conversation.

Supported file types

• Images (PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP)
• PDFs
• Plain text and Markdown files
• DOCX files

Other file types are rejected with an inline error.

Size limits

Individual attachments have a per-file size limit, and a single message has a total attachment size limit. If you exceed the limits the composer will tell you which file pushed you over and you can remove or compress it.

What happens with an attachment

Attachments are processed and made available to Henry as part of the message context. For images, Henry can describe and reason about what is shown — useful for sharing a screenshot of a Linear ticket, a design review comment, or a chart from a metrics dashboard. For documents, Henry reads the text content.

Attachments inside a chat message are scoped to that conversation. They are not added to your knowledge base and are not retrievable from other sessions. If you want a document to be available across all of Henry's answers, your admin should upload it to the knowledge base instead.

Pasting from the clipboard

You can paste an image directly into the composer (Cmd+V on macOS, Ctrl+V on Windows). This is the fastest way to share a screenshot.

Citations

When Henry's answer draws from your knowledge base, it cites the sources inline.

Citations appear as small inline references next to the relevant claim, with a list at the bottom of the message that names the source documents. Click a citation to expand it and see the snippet Henry pulled from. Click the document name to open the document in a new tab if you have access to view it.

A few things worth knowing about citations:

• Henry only cites the knowledge base, not your observations or other in-product data. Internal answers (e.g., "Sara's last observation was on March 12") are not cited because they reference your own data, not external documents.
• A response without citations is not necessarily ungrounded. It may be answering from your in-product data, where citation does not apply, or from general knowledge that does not require a source.
• Citation snippets are short. They show the relevant chunk Henry pulled from, not the entire document. Open the document for the full context.
• If Henry says something that contradicts a cited source, trust the source. Open the document, confirm the actual text, and let Henry know in the next message — it will adjust.

Sessions and history

Each chat with Henry is a session. Sessions persist so you can return to the same conversation later, even after closing the browser or signing out.

Starting a new session

Click the new-session control in the panel header. A new session has no prior context — Henry will not remember what you discussed in the previous session unless you re-introduce it.

Starting a new session is the right move when you switch topics. If you have been drafting a summary for one person and want to move on to a 1:1 prep for another, a fresh session keeps Henry's context tight and its answers more accurate.

Returning to a previous session

The session menu in the header shows your recent sessions, ordered by most recent activity. Click one to reopen it. The full message history loads, and you can continue typing where you left off.

If you had a guided flow open when you left the session, the flow's draft is restored. You can pick up at the step you were on without losing your work.

Session retention

Sessions are retained in your workspace. They are scoped to your account and are visible only to you (admins do not browse individual users' Henry sessions).

If you want to permanently remove a session, use the delete option in the session menu. Deleted sessions cannot be recovered.

Keyboard shortcuts

The panel supports a small set of shortcuts to keep your hands on the keyboard.

Shortcut	Action
Cmd/Ctrl + K	Open the panel from anywhere
Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + K	Close the panel from anywhere
Enter (in composer)	Send the message
Shift + Enter (in composer)	Insert a line break
Esc (in composer)	Clear the composer
Cmd/Ctrl + N (with panel open)	Start a new session
Up arrow (in empty composer)	Recall your last message for editing

Shortcuts are consistent across operating systems — Cmd on macOS, Ctrl on Windows and Linux.

Resizing and collapsing

The panel has a draggable left edge. Drag it to resize the panel anywhere between a minimum readable width and roughly half the screen.

Your chosen width persists across sessions and across devices, scoped to the same account.

There is also a collapse control in the header that minimizes the panel to a thin sidebar without closing it. Collapsing is useful when you want Henry available but not taking up screen real estate while you read or click around the rest of the app. Click the same control to expand again.

If you want the panel out of the way entirely, close it rather than collapse it — closing fully removes the panel from the layout until you reopen it.

Mobile behavior

On phones and small tablets, the Henry panel takes over the full screen when opened. The behavior is otherwise the same: the chat interface, attachments, citations, sessions, and guided flows all work.

Two mobile-specific notes:

• The keyboard shortcut to open Henry is not available on mobile. Use the panel button in the top navigation.
• File attachments on mobile open your device's file picker, which means you can attach photos from your camera roll or files from a cloud drive depending on the picker.

The panel adapts its layout to keep the composer above the on-screen keyboard. The most common interaction loop on mobile — open Henry, type a quick question, read the answer — works well, but extended drafting is more comfortable on desktop.

Free-form chat vs. guided flows

The panel supports two modes of interaction.

Free-form chat is what you have been reading about. You type a prompt, Henry responds. Conversations can wander, ask follow-ups, attach files, and pull from the knowledge base. Use this when your task is open-ended or exploratory: questions about your data, ad-hoc drafts, looking up a policy.

Guided flows are structured wizards inside the panel. They walk you through a multi-step task with explicit selection screens, editor steps, and a confirmation at the end. Use these when the task has a known shape and you want Henry to handle the structure rather than figure it out in chat.

A few examples of when each fits:

• "What did I write about Sara last quarter?" — free-form chat. There is no wizard for this; you are asking a question.
• "Draft an observation about Marcus from this morning's design review." — could be either. Free-form is faster for a one-off; the create-observation flow is better when you want the full structure (attributes, tags, recommended action) and a save-to-record step at the end.
• "Help me prep for my 1:1 with Priya tomorrow." — free-form is fine, but the start-conversation flow gives you a more reliable agenda with linked observations.
• "Write Marcus's quarterly summary." — use the start-summary flow. The structure is non-trivial and the flow handles it for you.

You can launch a guided flow from chat by asking for the relevant action ("Help me write a 360 response", "I want to add a new employee"). Henry will offer to start the flow, and accepting opens the wizard inside the panel.

For the full list of flows and what each one does, see Guided flows.

A typical chat

To make this concrete, here is a representative session.

You: What did I write about Sara in Q1?
Henry: You wrote four observations about Sara between Jan 1 and Mar 31. Two were tagged "technical leadership," one "stakeholder management," and one "ownership." Want me to summarize the themes or pull specific quotes?
You: Themes please.
Henry: Across Q1, the strongest pattern was stakeholder management — you noted three times that she handled difficult cross-team conversations well, particularly with the data team during the integrity review. The second theme was ownership: she caught the data integrity issue herself before launch. The growth area you flagged twice was scoping — she tends to commit to broader work than the timeline supports. Want me to draft this into a quarterly summary?
You: Yes, use the summary flow.
Henry: Got it. Opening the summary flow with Sara pre-selected.

At that point the panel transitions from free-form chat into the start-summary flow, with Sara already chosen and the Q1 date range pre-filled. You step through the flow's screens, review the draft, and save when ready. The completed flow appears as a card in the chat history so you can refer back to it.

This pattern — chat to explore, flow to commit — is how the panel is designed to be used. Free-form for thinking; flows for producing.

Next steps

• Guided flows covers each flow in detail.
• Knowledge base and retrieval explains how Henry pulls from your uploaded documents.
• Henry analytics is the admin-only view of how Henry is being used across your organization.