TreasureMap by Buried Wins — Benchmark Transcript #4 Deal Status: Closed Lost (chose Nexus PM) Contact: Priya Sharma, Senior Engineering Manager Contact Company: Cloudvault Technologies Interview Date: March 1, 2026 --- Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:10 - 00:00:15) Priya, thanks for taking the time. How's your day going? Priya Sharma (00:00:15 - 00:00:19) Pretty good, just got out of sprint planning. Thanks for having me. Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:20 - 00:00:32) Perfect timing then. We're doing research on how engineering teams evaluate project management tools. Everything anonymized, compiled with other interviews. Okay to record? Priya Sharma (00:00:32 - 00:00:34) Yep, all good. Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:36 - 00:00:42) Great. Tell me about your role. Priya Sharma (00:00:44 - 00:01:18) I'm a Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudvault. We build cloud infrastructure tooling — storage, backup, disaster recovery products. I manage three engineering teams, about 25 engineers total. We run two-week sprints and ship pretty aggressively. My teams need tight coordination because our products share underlying services. A change in one product can cascade to the others if we're not careful. Buried Wins Moderator (00:01:20 - 00:01:26) What prompted the evaluation? Priya Sharma (00:01:28 - 00:02:04) We'd been using a homegrown combination of tools — issue tracker plus a wiki plus Slack channels. It worked when we were two teams but at three teams with shared services, we were constantly stepping on each other. Pull requests would sit because nobody tracked cross-team dependencies. We'd find out about conflicts in production, not in planning. Our VP of Engineering said find a tool that gives us cross-team visibility without slowing down individual team velocity. That was the mandate. Buried Wins Moderator (00:02:06 - 00:02:12) What did you evaluate? Priya Sharma (00:02:14 - 00:02:52) Four tools. Nexus PM was the obvious first pick because half my engineers had used it before and liked it. TreasureMap came through a recommendation from a friend at another company who said it was good for cross-team coordination. ProjectCommand was on the list because our VP had used it at a previous company, though he wasn't pushing it. And we gave QuickPlan a day of evaluation before dropping it — not enough depth for engineering workflows. Buried Wins Moderator (00:02:54 - 00:03:02) Walk me through Nexus PM first since your engineers already knew it. Priya Sharma (00:03:04 - 00:04:08) Nexus PM felt like home for my teams. The GitHub integration is seamless — pull requests link to tasks automatically, you can see build status right in the project view. Sprint planning is native, not bolted on. The API is well-documented and our DevOps engineer set up custom automations within the first week. Cycle time analytics, deployment tracking, dependency graphs between services — it's all there. The interface assumes you're technical, which is fine for us. Everything is keyboard-navigable, you can use markdown everywhere, there's a CLI tool. My engineers were productive in it immediately because the mental model matches how they already think about work. Buried Wins Moderator (00:04:10 - 00:04:16) Any concerns with Nexus PM? Priya Sharma (00:04:18 - 00:04:58) Two main ones. First, our product managers and designers found it intimidating. There's a learning curve if you're not an engineer, and the Nexus PM team was upfront that they optimize for developer workflows. Second, the reporting for leadership is weak. My VP wanted a portfolio dashboard he could show the CEO and Nexus PM's executive reporting required custom configurations that took time to build. We ended up creating a separate dashboard outside the tool for leadership visibility. Not ideal, but workable for us. Buried Wins Moderator (00:05:00 - 00:05:06) How did TreasureMap compare? Priya Sharma (00:05:08 - 00:06:12) TreasureMap was a genuinely good experience. The cross-team dependency features were actually better than Nexus PM out of the box — you could see upstream and downstream impacts without custom configuration. The reporting was stronger for leadership views, which my VP appreciated. The interface was cleaner and more approachable, which our product managers and designers liked. Support was very responsive during the trial — we had a question about API rate limits and got a detailed answer within a couple hours. The documentation was practical and well-organized, maybe not as deep technically as Nexus PM's but more accessible for a mixed team. Buried Wins Moderator (00:06:14 - 00:06:22) So where did TreasureMap fall short for your team? Priya Sharma (00:06:24 - 00:07:18) The developer tooling gap was significant for us. TreasureMap's GitHub integration existed but it was basic — you could link PRs to tasks, but you didn't get the automatic status updates, the build visibility, or the code review workflows that Nexus PM has. No CLI tool, no native sprint mechanics. For a team that lives in the terminal and in GitHub, those aren't nice-to-haves. My engineers tried TreasureMap for a sprint and the feedback was that they felt like they were context-switching more — going to the browser to update things that Nexus PM handled automatically. Over a two-week sprint, that friction adds up. A few of them were pretty vocal that it slowed them down. Buried Wins Moderator (00:07:20 - 00:07:26) What about ProjectCommand? Priya Sharma (00:07:28 - 00:08:06) We gave ProjectCommand about two weeks. It was clearly built for a different customer — PMO-heavy organizations, not engineering teams. The interface was complex, the terminology was project management jargon that my engineers had no patience for. Setup required a dedicated admin which we don't have. The pricing was also significantly higher and required a multi-year commitment. My VP liked the executive dashboards but agreed the tool would've been dead on arrival with the engineering teams. We dropped it from the shortlist pretty quickly. Buried Wins Moderator (00:08:08 - 00:08:16) How did pricing compare between Nexus PM and TreasureMap? Priya Sharma (00:08:18 - 00:08:48) Pretty close actually. Nexus PM was slightly less expensive per seat, but TreasureMap's pricing included features that Nexus PM charged extra for, like the advanced reporting. All-in, they were within about 10 percent of each other. Price was not a factor in this decision at all. It was purely about which tool my engineers would actually use every day without fighting it. Buried Wins Moderator (00:08:50 - 00:08:58) What ultimately decided it? Priya Sharma (00:09:00 - 00:09:42) Developer experience. My engineers spend eight hours a day in these tools. If the tool doesn't fit their workflow natively, they'll find workarounds or just stop updating it, and then the whole system falls apart. Nexus PM fits how engineers work. TreasureMap is better for mixed teams and honestly better for leadership visibility, but I couldn't sacrifice the developer experience for my 25 engineers to make reporting easier for three executives. We patched the leadership reporting gap with a separate dashboard. Not elegant, but it works. Buried Wins Moderator (00:09:44 - 00:09:52) If TreasureMap closed the developer tooling gap, would that change things? Priya Sharma (00:09:54 - 00:10:20) One hundred percent. If TreasureMap had the GitHub integration depth, the CLI, and the native sprint workflows of Nexus PM, it would be the obvious choice for us. Better cross-team visibility, better reporting, better support, better interface for non-engineers. The developer tooling is the one thing holding it back for engineering-first teams. If they nail that, Nexus PM loses its only real advantage. Buried Wins Moderator (00:10:22 - 00:10:26) Thanks Priya. Really valuable perspective. Priya Sharma (00:10:26 - 00:10:28) Sure thing. Happy to help.