Fathom vs Fireflies for Commercial Architecture Design Reviews

Say a client says the entry feels "a little cold" during a design review. That phrase alone doesn't tell a designer what to change. Going back to the transcript for what came right before and after often reveals the actual concern, maybe it followed a comment about the lobby feeling disconnected from the street, which points to a very different fix than a comment about material tone would.

A generic summary that reads "client wants entry to feel warmer" loses that context entirely, and a designer working from it alone may revise the wrong element, like has actually happened with feedback reduced too far in past reviews.

Early programming calls, where a client describes how they'll use the space, tend to produce concrete, factual detail: room counts, adjacency requirements, a headcount the space needs to accommodate. Design review calls later produce more subjective, harder-to-pin-down reactions. Both benefit from being searchable, but for different reasons: programming calls as a factual reference, design review calls as a record of exactly how a client's taste and priorities evolved over the project.

A project architect joining midway through a long commercial project benefits enormously from being able to search both kinds of calls independently, confirming a hard programming requirement in seconds and tracing how a client's aesthetic direction shifted over several months of reviews.

A small studio where the principal attends every client call personally benefits most from fast, clean recaps that turn quickly into meeting minutes for the project file, without needing to search across a large library since the principal was there for all of it firsthand.

Once a studio grows enough that project architects run design reviews without the principal on every call, a searchable library lets the principal spot-check client sentiment across projects, and lets a project architect coming onto a project mid-stream catch up on how the client's preferences developed without reading through months of separate meeting minutes.

Confirm the tool captures screen shares clearly, since design reviews often involve a client reacting to renderings or drawings on screen, and a transcript without that visual context can be hard to interpret later. Check how comfortable your clients are with being recorded during a design conversation, since some prefer an unrecorded, more casual review. And keep a habit of writing real meeting minutes from the transcript rather than treating the raw transcript as the record itself.

Test this on one project first, ideally a mid-sized commercial job with a handful of reviews already scheduled, before deciding whether it's worth rolling out to every active project the studio has running.

Settle these points across the studio first:

• Confirm the tool captures screen shares clearly, since a transcript without the visual context of renderings or drawings can be hard to interpret later.
• Ask clients how comfortable they are being recorded during a design conversation, since some prefer an unrecorded, more casual review.
• Scan every design review transcript for budget and schedule comments as well as design direction, since those often get lost.
• Go back to the transcript around a vague reaction, such as an entry feeling cold, to find the actual concern before revising anything.

Design review notes tend to focus on the design feedback and let budget or schedule comments slip by, even though clients often raise them in the same breath as an aesthetic reaction. Build a habit of scanning every design review transcript specifically for budget and schedule language, not just design direction, since those comments have a way of getting lost when the notetaker is focused on capturing the design conversation.

Studios pursuing a brand new client typically face a longer runway than one already working with a returning client, something like 91 days versus 52 for the deal to actually close¹, and pushing too hard for a quick decision from a first-time commercial client can work against a studio's own interests. Recognizing that a new relationship is supposed to move slower changes how a principal reads a quiet stretch between meetings, less as a lost pursuit and more as a client working through their own internal approval process.