TreasureMap by Buried Wins — Benchmark Transcript #5 Deal Status: Closed Lost (chose QuickPlan) Contact: Amy Delgado, Head of Marketing Contact Company: Brightside Creative Agency Interview Date: March 3, 2026 --- Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:08 - 00:00:14) Amy, thanks for joining today. How's everything? Amy Delgado (00:00:14 - 00:00:18) Good, a little hectic but that's agency life. Thanks for having me. Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:20 - 00:00:32) Totally understand. We're doing research on how teams evaluate project management tools. Everything is anonymized. Okay to record? Amy Delgado (00:00:32 - 00:00:34) Sure, no problem. Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:36 - 00:00:42) Tell me about your role and team. Amy Delgado (00:00:44 - 00:01:20) I'm Head of Marketing at Brightside Creative Agency. We're about 35 people — designers, copywriters, account managers, a small dev team. I oversee the marketing operations side, which means I'm responsible for how projects flow from client brief through delivery. We run anywhere from 20 to 40 active projects at any time, most of them fast turnaround. A typical project might be three days to two weeks. We're not building software — we're delivering campaigns, brand assets, websites, content. Buried Wins Moderator (00:01:22 - 00:01:28) What prompted the evaluation? Amy Delgado (00:01:30 - 00:02:05) We were using email and a shared drive to manage everything. Creative briefs were Word docs attached to emails. Feedback was scattered across email threads, Slack, and text messages. Deadlines lived in people's heads. We lost a client because we delivered the wrong version of a campaign asset — the final version existed somewhere in someone's inbox but the account manager sent the previous draft. That was the tipping point. We needed a system that could track projects from brief to delivery in one place. Buried Wins Moderator (00:02:07 - 00:02:14) What tools did you evaluate? Amy Delgado (00:02:16 - 00:02:48) We tried three. QuickPlan was the first one I found because a friend at another agency was using it and loved it. TreasureMap was recommended by someone in a marketing ops community I'm part of. And we briefly looked at ProjectCommand because it came up in a Google search, but honestly we spent about 20 minutes on their website and decided it was way too much for us. Like, we're 35 people delivering creative projects. We don't need resource leveling and portfolio management. Buried Wins Moderator (00:02:50 - 00:02:56) Tell me about the QuickPlan evaluation. Amy Delgado (00:02:58 - 00:03:52) QuickPlan was love at first sight for my team. We signed up, and within an hour we had our first project board set up. The interface is beautiful — colorful, visual, drag-and-drop everything. My designers and copywriters, who are not technical people at all, were using it within the first day without any training. You just look at it and know what to do. The kanban boards work perfectly for our workflow — brief, in progress, review, delivered. We could attach files directly to tasks, leave comments, tag people. It felt like it was built for creative teams. The mobile app was also really good, which matters because our account managers are often at client sites. Buried Wins Moderator (00:03:54 - 00:04:00) Any limitations you noticed with QuickPlan? Amy Delgado (00:04:02 - 00:04:42) For sure. The reporting is basic — I can see what's on each board but there's no way to get an aggregate view across all projects. When leadership asks how many projects are in flight or what our average delivery time is, I'm still counting manually. Support was hit or miss. When we had questions during the trial, responses took a day or two and they weren't always helpful — felt like templates. And there's a limit to how much you can customize workflows. It's very opinionated about how things should work, which is fine when your workflow matches their assumptions but frustrating when it doesn't. Buried Wins Moderator (00:04:44 - 00:04:50) How did TreasureMap compare? Amy Delgado (00:04:52 - 00:05:50) TreasureMap was more capable, no question. The reporting was way better — I could actually see across all projects, track delivery timelines, identify bottlenecks. The support was really responsive and the person we talked to understood agency workflows, which was nice. Documentation was practical, had examples for creative teams which I wasn't expecting. The dependency tracking was useful too — when one deliverable blocks another, TreasureMap shows that clearly. And the customization was stronger. We could build workflows that matched how we actually work instead of adapting to the tool's assumptions. Buried Wins Moderator (00:05:52 - 00:05:58) So why didn't you go with TreasureMap? Amy Delgado (00:06:00 - 00:06:58) Adoption. Pure and simple. My team tried both during a two-week period and the feedback was overwhelming. QuickPlan, everyone used immediately. TreasureMap, I had to remind people to update their tasks. It's not that TreasureMap was hard exactly, but it had more structure — more fields, more options, more steps to create a task. For a team of designers and copywriters who just want to move a card from one column to the next, that extra structure felt like overhead. I had two designers tell me they'd rather go back to email than use something that required them to fill out six fields to log a task. QuickPlan let them create a task with a title and a drag. Done. In a creative agency, speed and simplicity beat features every time. Buried Wins Moderator (00:07:00 - 00:07:08) Was pricing a factor? Amy Delgado (00:07:10 - 00:07:42) A little bit. QuickPlan was less expensive — probably 30 percent cheaper per seat. For a 35-person agency that watches every dollar, that's meaningful. But honestly, even if they were the same price I would've picked QuickPlan because of the adoption factor. The cheapest tool is the one people actually use. If I'm paying for TreasureMap and half my team isn't logging their work in it, that's worse than paying less for QuickPlan where everyone's engaged. Buried Wins Moderator (00:07:44 - 00:07:52) Did you have any concerns about QuickPlan's limitations long term? Amy Delgado (00:07:54 - 00:08:28) Honestly, yes. The reporting gap worries me. And if we grow — which we're planning to — I'm not sure QuickPlan can scale with us. At 35 people with 40 projects it works. At 80 people with 100 projects, I'm less confident. I know TreasureMap would handle that growth better. But I chose to solve today's problem today and worry about next year's problem next year. Getting my team to actually use a project management tool was the first battle. I can always migrate later if we outgrow QuickPlan. Buried Wins Moderator (00:08:30 - 00:08:38) What would have made TreasureMap work for your team? Amy Delgado (00:08:40 - 00:09:16) A lightweight mode. If there was a way to strip TreasureMap down to QuickPlan-level simplicity for end users — minimal required fields, simple kanban view, quick task creation — while keeping the powerful reporting and dependency tracking for managers, that would've been the best of both worlds. The features are there for me as a manager. But the day-to-day experience for individual contributors needs to be as frictionless as QuickPlan. That gap between manager power and IC simplicity is what lost the deal. Buried Wins Moderator (00:09:18 - 00:09:24) And support — any final thoughts on that across the options? Amy Delgado (00:09:26 - 00:09:52) TreasureMap's support was the best by a mile. Fast, personalized, they actually understood what we were trying to do. QuickPlan's support was adequate but slow and generic. ProjectCommand's support, the little we saw, was clearly geared toward enterprise customers with dedicated account teams. For a 35-person agency, TreasureMap made us feel like a real customer. QuickPlan treated us like a ticket number. But again — support quality doesn't matter if the team won't open the tool. Buried Wins Moderator (00:09:54 - 00:09:58) Makes sense. Thanks Amy, this is really helpful. Amy Delgado (00:09:58 - 00:10:00) Happy to chat. Good luck.