Working in a village of purple people

Who’d have thought I’d end up working in technology? Not me, that’s for sure. I’m a bit of a geek at heart, love knowing how things work and get super excited by the power of digital technology to make our lives easier. But I don’t code or build models, and never planned to work in technology.

I was working in management consulting, helping wealth and asset management clients with their digital transformations, when an opportunity to join Vanguard presented itself. An opportunity to design and deliver the technology that powers Vanguard’s financial advice products to help investors meet their financial goals.

I joined Vanguard’s London office toward the beginning of the organisation’s international growth and evolution of financial advice offers—an amazing opportunity to expand Vanguard’s reach beyond the U.S. and help people in the U.K. invest. I was responsible for making sure the methodologies underpinning our advice offers were designed, tested, and delivered effectively, both from a back-end infrastructure perspective and a front-end client experience perspective.

This was such an exciting time to work in technology and support the growth of our U.K. Personal Investor business. This growth centred around the launch and evolution of Vanguard’s Managed Services offers—new investment management offers for retail U.K. investors who don’t have the time, willingness, ability, or confidence to invest themselves. These offers may be underpinned by multiple methodologies and microservices, but they were only made possible because of the ‘team of teams’ across the business and technology that collaborated with energy, commitment, and a shared vision. It really took a village of product owners, business analysts, developers, architects, engineers, delivery leads, designers, content experts, strategists, lawyers, proposition leads, compliance specialists, marketing crew, and many more. Over 60 people in over 10 teams working across three regions!

In other words, we worked as one team made up of lots of sub-teams. It just so happens that some sub-teams sit in the organisation’s technology division, and others in the business. But ultimately, we were all marching toward the same goal.

It wasn’t just the cross-functional collaboration that made this possible, it was the way in which we worked. Always thinking about the end investor first, favouring progress over perfection, and testing and learning made it possible to launch these offers in record speed. This mindset was spearheaded by inspiring senior leaders who had the courage and conviction to change the way we do things and embodied by determined product owners and delivery teams at the helm of launching these offers.

A leader recently shared the concept of ‘purple people’ with me, and I think it perfectly describes how Vanguard operates. Wayne Eckerson coined the phrase in 2010 to describe those with a mix of business and technology skills—those who blend the ‘red’ technical expertise with the ‘blue’ business acumen to create a purple skillset.

We need to speak the language of both worlds, to help translate client needs for data, system, and architecture solutions, and to help others ‘do the doing’ by designing and delivering technology solutions to meet these needs. We need people who know just enough business context and have just enough appreciation of technology design and delivery to bring people together to creatively come up with solutions for our investors.

Vanguard recognises the importance of purple people and goes above and beyond to encourage growth through its rotational culture, trying new things across the organisation, learning, and becoming well-rounded. I guess I’m a good example of this—joining Vanguard into a new advice methodology domain, and recently starting a new role in our Chief Data & Analytics Office!

Vanguard’s commitment to take a stand for all investors, driven by highly engaged crew and an inclusive culture aligns with what I love doing. Am I learning and solving problems? Always. Am I working with diverse and highly engaged teams? Every day. Am I helping others? I’m helping to give people in the U.K. a better chance of investment success, so I’d say absolutely!

I love that I’ve gained the knowledge and experience to implement technology solutions that help retail investors reach their financial goals. That said, I often forget that I formally sit in technology. To me, that’s a great thing because what matters is working with people with different skills and perspectives as one team to solve the right problems. A role in technology doesn’t have to mean being a developer, it can mean being a purple person.

– Aggie K.

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