TreasureMap by Buried Wins — Benchmark Transcript #2 Deal Status: Closed Won Contact: Marcus Rivera, VP of Engineering Contact Company: Canopy Health Systems Interview Date: February 19, 2026 --- Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:10 - 00:00:16) Marcus, thanks for making time. How's everything going? Marcus Rivera (00:00:16 - 00:00:20) Good, busy as always. Thanks for having me. Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:22 - 00:00:36) Appreciate it. We're researching how teams evaluate project management tools. Everything gets anonymized and combined with other interviews. Can I record this? Marcus Rivera (00:00:36 - 00:00:38) Yeah, go for it. Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:40 - 00:00:46) Great. Tell me about your role and your team. Marcus Rivera (00:00:48 - 00:01:30) I'm VP of Engineering at Canopy Health Systems. We build clinical workflow software for hospitals and health systems. About 80 engineers across four product teams, plus QA, DevOps, and a program management office. Before we brought in TreasureMap, each team was running its own system. Two teams used one tool, one team had their own setup in a different platform, and the PMO was trying to stitch it all together in spreadsheets. It was a visibility nightmare for leadership. We couldn't answer basic questions like which projects are on track and where are the bottlenecks. Buried Wins Moderator (00:01:32 - 00:01:38) What pushed you to finally make a change? Marcus Rivera (00:01:40 - 00:02:18) We missed a regulatory deadline. A compliance feature that was supposed to ship in Q3 slipped to Q4 because dependencies between two teams weren't tracked anywhere centrally. When the CEO asked me what happened, I couldn't give a clear answer because I was piecing together status from three different tools and a dozen Slack threads. That was the moment. He told me to find one system for everyone within 90 days. Buried Wins Moderator (00:02:20 - 00:02:26) Walk me through who you evaluated. Marcus Rivera (00:02:28 - 00:03:22) My program manager did the initial research and brought back three options plus TreasureMap, which I'd heard about from a CTO in my network. ProjectCommand was the enterprise option — the one you'd expect to see on a shortlist for a company our size. Nexus PM was already being used by two of my teams so there was a natural pull toward just standardizing on that. And QuickPlan was brought up by a product manager who loved it at her last company. So four total. Buried Wins Moderator (00:03:24 - 00:03:32) Let's go through them. Starting with what was already in place — Nexus PM. Marcus Rivera (00:03:34 - 00:04:35) The teams using Nexus PM liked it for their own work. It has great developer tooling — connects to GitHub, handles sprint workflows well, the API is clean. My engineers respected the product technically. The problem was everything outside of engineering. When we tried to expand it to the PMO and get cross-team visibility, the interface fell apart for non-technical users. My program managers found it confusing. The dashboards required custom configuration that basically needed a developer to set up. And the support team, when we asked about cross-functional use cases, kept pointing us to documentation that assumed everyone was a developer. Good product for engineering teams. Not built for a whole organization. Buried Wins Moderator (00:04:37 - 00:04:42) What about ProjectCommand? Marcus Rivera (00:04:44 - 00:05:48) ProjectCommand is the one where you feel like you're buying an aircraft carrier when you need a speedboat. The capabilities are genuinely impressive — they can handle programs with hundreds of workstreams, resource management at the individual level, executive dashboards that would make a CFO happy. But the implementation timeline was four months minimum, with a dedicated solutions architect from their side. The licensing model was complex — different tiers for different user types, add-ons for integrations we'd consider basic. My program manager sat through the pricing walkthrough and said she felt like she was negotiating a mortgage. And the tool itself — it's powerful but dense. Every screen has fifteen options. My engineers would rather quit than use something that heavyweight for their day-to-day. Brand recognition is strong though. Leadership knew the name, which gave it credibility in internal conversations. Buried Wins Moderator (00:05:50 - 00:05:56) And QuickPlan? Marcus Rivera (00:05:58 - 00:06:42) QuickPlan was the product manager's pick and I could see why. It looks great, it's fast to set up, very low learning curve. We had it running in under a day. But when we stress-tested it with our actual project structure — four teams, shared dependencies, compliance tracking — it buckled. Couldn't handle our level of complexity. The reporting topped out at basic status views. When we asked about custom fields and advanced automations, the answer was always coming soon or not on the roadmap. Support was friendly but slow — we'd wait two days for responses to trial questions. Fine for a team of ten. Not for 80 engineers and a PMO. Buried Wins Moderator (00:06:44 - 00:06:50) How did the TreasureMap evaluation go? Marcus Rivera (00:06:52 - 00:08:02) Honestly I was skeptical going in because it was the least well-known of the four. But the evaluation won me over. First thing that stood out was the onboarding — their team did a working session with us where they mapped our actual team structure and workflows into the tool. It wasn't a generic demo, it was our data, our projects. That took about a week to get fully set up, which was dramatically faster than ProjectCommand and more structured than QuickPlan's self-serve approach. The interface handled both my engineers and my program managers without either group complaining, which I honestly didn't think was possible. The dependency tracking across teams worked out of the box. And the reporting was strong enough for leadership without requiring a PhD to configure. Buried Wins Moderator (00:08:04 - 00:08:12) How was the support experience with TreasureMap? Marcus Rivera (00:08:14 - 00:08:58) Best of the four, and it wasn't close. During the trial we had a question about how to set up cross-team dependency alerts. I submitted a ticket and got a response within two hours from someone who clearly understood multi-team setups. They didn't just answer the question — they shared how another customer with a similar structure had configured it. That level of contextual support is rare. ProjectCommand's support was competent but you had to go through a queue. Nexus PM's support was fast but only useful for technical questions. QuickPlan's support was the weakest — generic answers that felt copy-pasted. Buried Wins Moderator (00:09:00 - 00:09:08) How did pricing compare across the four? Marcus Rivera (00:09:10 - 00:09:55) ProjectCommand was the most expensive by far — probably 2.5x what TreasureMap quoted for comparable seats. QuickPlan was the cheapest on paper but once you added the features we actually needed, the gap narrowed a lot. Nexus PM was mid-range. TreasureMap was competitive with Nexus PM, maybe slightly more, but the value was clear because we wouldn't need to build custom workarounds for non-engineering users. The pricing structure was also simple — per seat, billed monthly or annually. No surprise add-ons, no tiered feature gates for basic functionality. After ProjectCommand's fifteen-page quote, that simplicity was refreshing. Buried Wins Moderator (00:09:57 - 00:10:06) What ultimately made you choose TreasureMap? Marcus Rivera (00:10:08 - 00:10:52) It was the only option that worked for the whole organization, not just one constituency. Nexus PM was great for engineers but left the PMO behind. ProjectCommand was built for the PMO but would've crushed my engineers. QuickPlan was easy for everyone but couldn't handle our complexity. TreasureMap threaded the needle. Both my engineering leads and my program managers gave it a thumbs up after the trial. That's never happened before in a tool evaluation. The support quality sealed it — I need a vendor partner, not just a software license. Buried Wins Moderator (00:10:54 - 00:11:02) Anything TreasureMap should improve? Marcus Rivera (00:11:04 - 00:11:38) The brand recognition is the obvious one. When I brought it to leadership, I had to explain what it was. ProjectCommand and Nexus PM were known quantities. I had to make the case on the merits of the trial, which worked, but it added a step to the process. Also, the integrations with developer tools aren't as deep as Nexus PM yet. My engineers can work with what's there, but if TreasureMap matched Nexus PM's GitHub and CI/CD integration depth, that would remove the last objection. Buried Wins Moderator (00:11:40 - 00:11:44) Makes sense. Thanks Marcus, really appreciate the detail. Marcus Rivera (00:11:44 - 00:11:46) Anytime. Good luck with the research.