Vanguard recently made two horrible mistakes: 1. a typical "Grand UI Redesign" that made the site worse and removed a bunch of previously working features, and 2. They made all their users "migrate" their accounts from one type to another, a process that I found to be error prone and clunky.
For 1, all of us software people have seen companies do this over and over, and it always sucks. For 2, why they couldn't do whatever backend migration they needed to do without having it disrupting retail customers, I have no idea.
Both of those point to a software organization way below where it needs to be competence-wise.
Vanguard's grand UI redesign was poorly done. At the time each team was responsible for some software product, and had a good ownership model. The issue imo was that the internal UI component library was poorly made and funded, and that the UX team was very old (most of the people were lifers that were hired in the 90s, no real experience in UI/UX,etc.) So people were just making the designs they were given. The Grand UI Redesign was a single new team that just made a heavy Angular UI application for the major areas, forcing product teams to be backend only. This caused discontinuity and didn't really fix the core issue.
I've had the same Vanguard accounts for 15 years (Rollover IRAs, Roth IRAs, non-retirement) and I don't remember having to migrate anything. If something was migrated, I wasn't even aware it happened.
For 1, all of us software people have seen companies do this over and over, and it always sucks. For 2, why they couldn't do whatever backend migration they needed to do without having it disrupting retail customers, I have no idea.
Both of those point to a software organization way below where it needs to be competence-wise.