Driving engineering effectiveness at scale: Vanguard’s story with DX
Vanguard, a leading investment and advisory firm, is supported by more than 5,000 engineers to deliver digital experiences for its customers. “Most of our customer interactions are through those digital channels,” says Mike Carr, Chief Technology Officer. “It’s easy to create digital channels, but it’s hard to create great digital channels. That’s why we want to give developers an environment where they can test and learn, and iterate quickly, efficiently, and safely.”
Before adopting DX, Vanguard used internal surveys to understand what was impacting developer productivity and experience, but the approach had limitations. “Prior to DX, we ran a homegrown survey, but participation hovered around 30%,” says Dennis Becton, Senior Director of Engineering Enablement and Advancement. “It gave us a general sense of direction, but it just wasn’t enough.”
“We’re spread across 800 product teams and have more than 5,000 people in IT, so having visibility into the engineering experience is incredibly valuable,” adds Kelly Anne Pipe, Head of Developer Experience. “With DX, we get both qualitative and quantitative data that shows whether our developers have the resources they need to get their work done, without unnecessary friction.”
Today, DX is used across three levels of Vanguard’s organization. At the team level, it drives autonomous improvements, helping give developers more focus time and strengthening cross-team collaboration. At the platform level, DX provides continuous feedback to guide roadmaps and tooling enhancements. At the leadership level, the data drives alignment and informs investment decisions, with insights reaching all the way to the global CIO. “DX results are reviewed from the global CIO down to our individual team leaders,” says Pipe. “Our senior leaders are looking at this data, our team leaders are looking at this data, and everybody’s working together to figure out how to make the engineering experience better here at Vanguard.”
“One of the advantages of using DX across all our engineers is that it gives us a consistent view across our 800 product teams, whether they’re in the US, the UK, or Australia,” adds Carr. “It allows us to surface the big themes and address them both locally and systematically across the entire engineering community.”
DX also provided Vanguard with benchmarking data tailored to financial institutions, giving the team valuable context on engineering effectiveness. “Benchmarking in DX has been huge for us,” says Becton. “It’s helped us pinpoint exactly where we need to improve and where we want to go when setting goals.”
In addition to benchmarking, DX has enabled Vanguard to get a clearer understanding of the impact AI is having on engineering effectiveness. By combining qualitative feedback from developers with quantitative productivity metrics, the team has been able to establish a baseline for AI’s influence, both today and moving forward. “DX helps us measure how AI is actually affecting developers’ day-to-day work, which has been incredibly valuable,” says Becton. “We’re always looking for correlations between leading indicators and AI usage to see where we can lean in and help our teams be more effective.”
With DX enabling consistent measurement across Vanguard’s global engineering organization of 800+ teams, the company has built a strong foundation for continuous improvement. “What we get from the DX platform is this rich source of information,” says Carr. “If you want a sustainable advantage over time, you need to create an environment where developers are progressively more satisfied with how they work and more effective in what they do. DX helps us find that healthy intersection.”
That focus on developer experience is already translating into tangible outcomes. “We’ve moved the ball considerably on developer experience,” adds Becton. “In turn, that’s helped our product teams improve their pace of delivery, ultimately benefiting our investors and customers.”
Listen to Vanguard’s story:
