Meet Nicolas Couture: Lead Developer

Interview with Nicolas Couture

What is your role, and what are your main responsibilities at Maarch?

Since early 2025, I’ve been Lead Developer in Maarch’s R&D team, working on the Maarch Courrier product. The team is split between Bidart and Nanterre, but I’m lucky enough to code with a stunning view of the Pyrenees!

Day to day, my role stays very close to that of the developers, namely:

• Analysing bug tickets or new features to be implemented
• Estimating the effort required for each ticket
• Developing features or fixing bugs
• Testing and ensuring the quality of the rest of the team’s work
• Documenting new features

Alongside this, I coordinate the Maarch Courrier development team. I work closely with the Product Owner to ensure the roadmap moves forward and to liaise with the other Maarch teams.

How are you involved in defining and implementing the Maarch Courrier roadmap?

I’m not directly responsible for defining the roadmap, but I get involved upstream with the rest of the team, to estimate the effort needed for changes requested by management or by clients via the project team.

We then meet each month with management and the project team to plan upcoming versions and allocate development work based on priorities and estimated effort.

Cross-team collaboration is essential at Maarch: how do you work with other teams to move projects forward?

Cross-team collaboration is obviously central to how we work. Two teams are particularly key: the project team, who are in direct contact with clients and pass on their needs; and the infrastructure team, who handle the deployment of new versions on release.

To keep communication flowing smoothly, several practices have been put in place:

• For major feature requests, we run workshops facilitated with the help of our Product Owner. Everything is then summarised, and mocked up if needed, before being validated by the project team to check it matches the client’s needs.
• For each version release, we summarise for the infrastructure team any potential configuration changes or migration scripts needed to move from version N to version N+1.

Two key moments also shape collaboration between teams:

• At the end of each sprint (a 2-week development period), a presentation of the new features is given to the other teams.
• For each feature release, a test session is organised with someone from the infrastructure team and someone from the project team, to check compliance and anticipate any potential issues.

What aspects of your work do you find particularly rewarding or stimulating?

Seeing our product evolve week after week is genuinely satisfying. Positive feedback from clients or teams who requested certain features is particularly rewarding: it shows that our work — from design through to deployment — was done well and truly meets expectations.

What motivates you to get up every morning?

What motivates me to get up every morning as a developer is the feeling of bringing real added value to a product used on a large scale across France. Today, Maarch Courrier holds a central place for Maarch, having become a national benchmark among the various mail management applications out there.

And of course, none of this would be possible without being surrounded by a great team of developers, working in a really good atmosphere.

Coming Up…

Maarch is getting ready to roll out a new software update in early February: version 26.0 of the Maarch Courrier solution. This update marks an important milestone for Maarch, as it includes major technical improvements and security updates, laying the groundwork for the solution’s future developments.

To find out more about version 26.0, read the article !