How Vanguard is powering client success and igniting career growth

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Investment management company Vanguard is known for its rotational culture. The company believes this makes their employees, or crew as they’re known at Vanguard, more well-rounded and ultimately enhances the client experience. Crew are encouraged to learn continuously and explore different opportunities. 

After earning a computer engineering degree from Penn State University and interning with Vanguard, Cole Cugini was onboarded into Vanguard’s Technology Leadership Program (TLP), a program for graduates with a bachelor’s degree in a technical or engineering field of study. The two-year program coordinates three rotations on different technology teams at Vanguard. It aims to help graduates develop their technical skills, business acumen, and leadership skills through hands-on experience in the company’s IT division.  

Cugini was curious about how a role in application development at a financial services firm would refine his tech skills, but once he saw how the company invested in its crew, he knew he made the right choice.

“The culture here really emphasized supporting your interests,” Cugini said. 

In his first rotation in the TLP, Cugini spent eight months focused on data processing and working on API endpoints to develop internal applications that supported Vanguard’s personal advisor offerings. 

For his second eight-month rotation, he worked in the Chief Technology Office which is responsible for adopting new technologies, researching new tools, and finding the best strategic tech solutions for developers to leverage when serving partners, fellow crew, and Vanguard clients. During the rotation, he developed a curriculum to upskill developers in site reliability engineering and created a community of practice focused on site reliability responsibilities and roles.

His final rotation was on a feature delivery team where he built the client-facing elements of Vanguard’s mobile app for personal investors. He found it rewarding to be able to provide a seamless and intuitive experience directly to Vanguard clients, seeing firsthand how his work could make a difference in their financial lives. This sentiment is what led him to become an application developer after completing the TLP program.     

Of the program, he says he felt incredibly supported throughout the rotations, which provided a great opportunity to be exposed to each role’s expectations, experience different areas of IT, and learn something valuable. 

Client feedback fuels innovation

Cugini is in good company amongst engineers at Vanguard, as they make up more than half of the IT division. 

Valeriia Vagner, a mobile technical lead based in Berlin, Germany works on the mobile app for personal investor clients in the U.K. That app alone has more than 12 teams working on it. Each cross-functional team—comprised of a product manager, a scrum lead, and all the essential roles for full stack development—is responsible for a different part of the app. 

The app’s recent launch is part of Vanguard’s ongoing mission to improve the user experience for clients.

“When we released the application, it lacked a lot of features compared to the website,” said Valeriia. “But then we started to collect client feedback on the things that they believe are important.” 

Vanguard’s client services team responds to comments on Google Play and the App Store. There’s also the opportunity for users to offer feedback within the app, which is reviewed by the product manager and their team. Valeriia’s team—consisting of three engineers for each major app platform—has access to this feedback, too.

Based on the feedback from clients, she said the teams made improvements and introduced new features, like linked accounts and enhancing the main page to make multiple accounts visible. 

“What drives me, what excites me, is really when we deliver something new, when we push it to the public and see how it’s been perceived,” she shared. “We never stop feature development… We have our goals. But once you reach one point, there is another point that you need to reach. And it’s like you’re constantly going up.”

Going deeper with data-driven innovation

Vanguard also does deeper research to make their products better. The company deploys a team of data analysts and researchers who interview clients for app feedback. They present clients with potential redesigns or different versions of the same feature to gauge which they prefer. 

This approach allows Vanguard to prioritize new features by hearing the client voice through a combination of reactive comments and proactive feedback. This open-mindedness translates internally as well. 

The company offers platform-specific meetings called “deep dives” or “tag-ups” that allow iOS, Android, and back-end engineers to discuss new functions and capabilities for their respective technologies. This gives them opportunities to learn and share ways to increase the app’s efficiency. 

By fostering an environment where feedback is welcomed and actively sought, Vanguard ensures that its products are innovative and meeting the needs of its clients, and crew are growing in their careers. Whether it’s through refining existing features or exploring new technologies, the company firmly holds to its beliefs centered on always putting the client first.