Quark has been at the forefront of content technology innovation, continually investing its Quark Publishing Platform (QPP) NextGen to help enterprises simplify each phase of the content lifecycle journey.
Nishant Malge plays a vital role to ensuring new features and capabilities available in QPP NextGen meet global organizations’ current and future content management challenges. Motivated by a hunger for innovation and an awareness that not every idea succeeds, but perseverance is crucial, Malge has proudly been with Quark for over two decades and leads a team of what he calls “brilliant minds”. The collaborative team keeps pace with the ever-changing technology landscape and work closely together to ensure product investments align with customer and partner requirements and support enterprise content strategy goals at scale.
We recently sat down with Nishant to learn more about the reasons behind his long tenure at Quark, how the current and emerging technology climate impacts R&D initiatives, and his vision for QPP NextGen.
You’ve been with Quark for several years, what is the reason for your long-term association with the company?
I joined Quark over 22 years ago. What keeps me motivated is the opportunity for growth and the focus on innovation, particularly among the R&D teams. Quark’s corporate culture is very collaborative and transparent, with a strong emphasis on the well-being of every employee. During my tenure, I left Quark for a short time for another opportunity but quickly realized what I was missing at Quark, quickly returning and never looking back. From a professional perspective, I’ve had the opportunity to work with several products across the company’s digital publishing portfolio before focusing exclusively on innovating across the company’s enterprise content lifecycle offering, QPP NextGen. I’ve learned so much from my colleagues over the years and have approached each challenge as an opportunity to gain knowledge. All of this has contributed to why I love working at Quark.
How do you ensure R&D initiatives align with business goals?
When we plan for new features/capabilities for QPP NextGen we’re careful to balance the pace of technology advancements with customer requirements. We issue a new release of QPP NextGen every quarter and at the same time keep a backlog of technical enhancements. We do this because technology changes fast and we want to make sure we leverage the right technology at the right time to give the most value to our customers. From a planning perspective, we put together a futuristic roadmap based on many aspects. This includes what we hear from customers and partners, insight from product managers and sales teams, what other key players in our industry are doing, and closely align this with market research so we can make smart decisions. Our end goal is to ensure we deliver solutions that address the enterprise content challenges our customers are looking to solve today and in the future.
How do you measure success of an R&D project?
We have a few barometers for success but one of the biggest is the performance itself. The user experience must be exceptional and our Quality Engineer Testing team in particular works very hard to ensure all features included in a new release are excellent and can support multiple concurrent users across an enterprise organization.
What is your vision for QPP NextGen?
Our vision is anchored by always uncovering new ways to improve the user experience. How can we support their content strategies at scale? How can we keep content teams engaged with our products, from a collaborative team and individual contributor aspect? How can we make it easier for our customers to use our solutions? Our vision maps to new features that speak to these questions and give customers the opportunity to take a self-service approach to managing their content strategy. We’ll continually look for opportunities to leverage AI technology to improve the user experience and help our partner ecosystem implement tailored solution to address a specific customer use case.
Can you tell me about your leadership style?
I try to instil a combination of collaboration and empowerment among my teams that allows them the opportunity to learn and encourages them take risks. We’re all working towards a clear end goal. As a leader, I make sure to have a backup plan and foster a team culture that replaces a fear of failure mentality with a take a risk one. Things won’t stick unless you keep trying.
Tell me a bit about yourself. What are your passions outside of work and/or what do you like to do in your free time?
I enjoy singing. I have a great group of friends where we get together regularly at a coffee shop or at one of our home’s and sing together in front of families. I also have 2 dogs that I adore.
