One creative, every format
Zubin is the entire creative function at MES. Training video series, product IFUs, cup labels, trade show booth graphics, direct mail, software launch imagery, campaign visuals, landing pages, long form marketing collateral. Video, PDF, images, web, documents. All of it goes through one person.
It is also a regulated environment. A label revision or an instructions-for-use document is not just a design decision, it is something that ships attached to a medical device, which means the review that precedes it carries more weight than an argument about a headline.
The problem was never the design
Everything ran through email and Slack. Zubin would export a cut, drop it on Dropbox or send a link, then wait for replies to trickle in from Outlook threads, Slack DMs, and occasionally a screenshot pasted into a message with a circle drawn on it.
Reviewers were typing timestamps by hand. At 0:47 the logo is too small. He was cross referencing that against the timeline himself, one note at a time, translating other people's descriptions back into positions in a file.
Two people would give conflicting feedback in separate threads and he would only find out after making the change. Someone would review an outdated export because the newest link was buried further up an email chain. Nothing was tied to the actual frame or the actual version.
Every round cost me an hour of chasing before a single minute of real editing happened.
What changed
He was looking for one link that held the asset and the feedback in the same place, and one tool that could handle video, PDFs and images rather than a separate solution per format. The deciding factor was what reviewers had to do: no seat setup, no software to learn.
Setup took a day. He uploaded a file, shared the link, and had comments back within the hour. Nothing to train anyone on, which mattered because his reviewers are executives and operations people, not creatives.
The moment it was obvious
A training video series, multiple reviewers, a hard deadline. The old version of that project is a week of scattered replies and chasing people, ending in the discovery that two of them wanted opposite things after the cut was already made.
Instead he posted one link. Everyone commented on the same timeline and could see each other's notes. Two conflicting requests were resolved in the comment thread by the reviewers themselves, before it ever reached him. He opened the file once, made every change in a single pass, and it was approved the next morning.
The result
Roughly five to six hours a week back , almost all of it the consolidation work: reading through Slack DMs, email threads and screenshots and turning them into one usable list before the project file could even be opened. That step no longer exists.
Revision rounds dropped from about four to two on most projects, because conflicting notes surface together instead of arriving days apart. Sign off that used to take a week now lands in one to two days . A separate markup tool and a set of shared review folders on Dropbox both went away.
There is a second benefit he did not buy the tool for. In a regulated environment, seeing the full comment history on a version saves real time when he needs to retrace how a piece got to final. It is a working reference, not a formal record.
What it changed beyond the schedule
In Zubin's words, it made him look more organised than a one person creative team has any right to look. Sending a clean review link instead of a zip file and an apology sets a different tone with leadership. When he needs to retrace how a piece reached its final form, the thread is there rather than scattered across an email chain.
The real win is quieter than the hours. He is not carrying the mental load of tracking who said what across four channels, which means his time goes to the creative work rather than to project management he was never hired to do.
My reviewers are executives and regulatory staff, not creatives. They were never going to learn a new tool. With BugSmash they click a link and start marking things up. That's the entire reason it stuck.
Who he would tell
Solo creatives and small in-house teams who review work with people who are not creatives. If your reviewers are executives, operations leads or regulatory staff who will never learn a new tool, that is the case, because they do not have to. It also suits anyone working across mixed formats, video plus print plus web, who is tired of running a different review process for each.
His own caveat: a large creative team with a full project management stack already in place may not feel the difference as sharply. This is built for the people who are the bottleneck themselves.
When you're the only creative in the building, the admin work around feedback is the thing that actually burns you out, not the creative work itself.
Case study prepared with Zubin Sahney, Creative Lead at Medical Electronic Systems. Published with his permission.
