The work
A coursebook is not one person's document. Developing educational materials runs through many stages, and at each one a different professional with a different role weighs in: design, language, media, content. Four kinds of expertise, four vocabularies, all pointed at the same page.
Ahmad's team of ten are freelancers. Nobody shares a schedule, which means every review has to work without the people in it being available at the same time. Asynchronous is not a preference here, it is the only way the work moves.
The problem
Feedback came as screenshots over WhatsApp, and as comments added to a PDF that then had to be sent around as a file. Every point was then discussed in text messages alongside the artefact rather than on it.
Ahmad's summary of that arrangement is two words: messy, to say the least. It failed in two specific ways. Finding a particular comment again was genuinely difficult, because comments lived in a chat log rather than anywhere structured. And discussing any single point meant reconstructing which point everyone was talking about before the discussion could start.
What changed
He went looking because the old way had become intolerable, found BugSmash, and thought it might be the answer. Setup did not slow him down: he signed up and had his first project uploaded within seconds, on an interface he found immediately intuitive.
The pieces that carry a ten person freelance review:
The result
Ahmad puts the change at at least 80% less time spent on feedback . The second effect matters as much on a distributed team: work continues even though nobody shares a schedule, and sign-offs land faster precisely because they no longer wait for everyone to be awake at once.
Asked for the single biggest difference, he did not pick a feature that saves clicks. He picked organisation: folders and sub folders, and being able to grant access to specific people, is what makes running the projects manageable at all.
His own summary of the effect is that stress went down and the whole process now looks more professional. And, in an aside worth noticing on a task most teams find tedious, that it is fun.
BugSmash is like having a home for your feedback.
Who he would tell
Anyone involved in feedback, internal or external. He does not narrow it further, and given his own use runs from a PDF page layout to an audio recording to a website, the breadth is the point.
What his team values most is not on the feature list: that the people building it keep shipping and keep listening. His advice to anyone weighing it up is shorter than any of this.
Don't hesitate, try it and see for yourself.
Case study prepared with Ahmad Zaytoun of The ELT School. Published with his permission.
