Our Technology Transformation: The Inside Story

Technology has played an increasingly critical role in financial services, as customers seek seamless experiences and companies compete to be more agile providers. At T. Rowe Price, this has sparked significant organizational and cultural shifts, creating exciting opportunities for technologists looking to influence the industry’s future.

Recognizing technology’s central role in our evolution as the financial services sector took new shape, T. Rowe Price, six years ago, redefined the role of tech across our firm: Instead of seeing it as a shared service across our business, we embraced it as a strategic enabler of the business itself. This has had a particularly profound impact across our technology organization, from how we’ve structured our systems to how we’ve trained our talent.

Today, our technology group has transformed its relationship with the firm. This has brought innovation to how our clients invest and has given technologists more ownership over the future of our technology stack. Here are three examples of the kind of people who’ve helped make this happen and the tech-related experiences that await new hires at T. Rowe Price.

1. The Ambitious Associate: Embracing a New Path for Growth

Our cloud transformation has been exciting for our technologists. Cloud-first technologies have empowered our teams to experiment and innovate with ever-increasing agility, accelerating the speed at which we can develop products for our clients and colleagues.

“Things are way more fast-paced now,” says Pedro Landa, a senior infrastructure operations analyst on our Investment Data Services and Distribution team. Here, Pedro ensures that our investment data systems and applications operate smoothly and efficiently. “We used to wait months or weeks; now, it’s days to weeks to get something built up and running and ready to use.”

For associates like Pedro, the dawn of the cloud-first era has been defined by both change and uncertainty. When Pedro joined T. Rowe Price in 2012, our technology team still built servers internally, and most of our troubleshooting tools were housed on systems that administrators could walk to, physically. The cloud era has changed that: Today, troubleshooting an issue often requires logging in to distant servers and monitoring an exponentially increasing trove of data. Old tools and ways of working just aren’t enough.

Recognizing the opportunities for updating his skills, Pedro turned to Degreed, a learning and upskilling platform that we offer associates. Through Degreed, Pedro was able to learn how to use tools like Splunk, which is a software platform to search, analyze, and visualize the machine-generated data gathered from the websites’ applications, sensors, and devices.

“People get into tech because they want to be on the cutting edge,” he says, explaining his interest in updating his skills. “At T. Rowe, there is always an opportunity to solve legacy infrastructure challenges with newer technology. That’s one of the most attractive things about being here.”

Pedro says he also appreciates the increased focus on collaboration over the past few years, especially since developers have a much larger role in the planning and development of new infrastructure. Years ago, they would often not be brought into the process until production had begun; today, they’re getting involved on day one.

This approach has resulted in not just a smoother and more efficient production process, but it has also allowed Pedro and his colleagues to feel more ownership over the future of T. Rowe Price. “For me, it’s always important to be part of conversations about how we do things day to day,” he says. “I like to feel like my voice is being heard.”

2.?The Agile Coach: Giving Technologists a Voice

Agile product development is everywhere in the technology world—including at T. Rowe Price. Defined by a focus on incremental, iterative design, the Agile approach empowers product teams to test new products while they’re still under development. Typically contrasted with the more structured “waterfall” methodology, Agile has become central to our ability to deliver new products to clients and colleagues at speed and scale.

“I’ve used both approaches, and, for me, Agile has always been a much better way to work,” says Stephen Wingert, a senior Agile coach on T. Rowe Price's Enterprise Architecture team. “It’s also more fun.”

As one of seven coaches in our organization, Stephen is responsible for working alongside our business partners to embed Agile principles in our product development process. His appreciation for Agile came early in his 16-year tenure at T. Rowe Price, when he worked on a project that didn’t apply it. As a new project manager, he shadowed the development of an internal document locator tool for our marketing and client teams. Though the project was delivered on time, met all requirements, and passed user-experience testing, when the tool went live, no one wanted to use it.

So the team went back to the drawing board. Embracing the Agile mindset, they quickly built a working prototype to get reactions from business partners and key stakeholders throughout the design process. Three months and $30,000 later, Stephen and his team delivered a second version of the product. Users loved it.

“Discovering Agile was an epiphany for me,” says Stephen, who has, over the years, worked to?evangelize Agile across our organization. “Agile works because it focuses on business value, close collaboration, and partnership with the business. Most importantly, it treats our development team like humans instead of just resources within a project plan.”

Indeed, Agile’s ability to foster deeper collaboration between engineers and business colleagues has proven to be one of its most durable benefits. “Our developers have a seat at the table before anyone writes a line of code,” he adds. “They’re not just coding, they're using their knowledge to build a better product and develop a more fluid set of skills.”

3. The Transformational Leader: Laying the Foundation for Change?

None of the changes detailed above would be possible without strong leadership. To be effective, leaders must be able to both lay out a compelling vision for the future and guide their teams on how to make that vision a reality.

This is difficult to do well—in part because change can be scary for associates who understandably worry about how large organizational shifts will impact their roles. Leaders who fail to recognize these concerns risk derailing their organization’s change efforts entirely.

T. Rowe Price was no exception to this reality. For many associates, “every part of their day job changed,” says Kris Caverly, head of our Corporate Technology Group. “We’re developing with different languages, deploying on different platforms, and working with entirely different teams. Supporting our talent through this moment is so critical.”

That support has taken on many forms. For employees concerned about the transformation, Kris held a series of virtual town halls and one-on-one “ask me anything” coffee sessions, allowing her team to share their feelings and opinions about the many changes underway. Other associates were worried about not having the necessary skills to thrive in this new era for the firm. Kris encouraged these associates to seek external learning opportunities and explore upskilling platforms such as Degreed. Many associates, including Pedro, took her advice.

Helping employees embrace this change often meant selling them on the transformation and what it would enable. “We would have town hall sessions where I would tell people, ‘This is a once-in- a-lifetime opportunity. It’s green fields. We get to redo the entire stack,’” Kris says.

Kris includes herself among the T. Rowe Price associates who have needed to deepen and refine their skills over the past few years. While she’s led through many transitions in her 23-year tenure at the firm, she still had some doubts about her ability to lead her team through this particularly challenging time of transformation. Her concerns were further heightened by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, which complicated her ability to connect with and remain visible to her organization.

“When I thought about the work we’re doing, our ambition, our talent needs, and our associates’ concerns, it made me realize that I needed to deepen and refine my own skills to be the leader that my team needed,” she says.

To develop these skills, Kris turned to other leaders. At industry conferences, and in personal conversations, she learned from others about their own transformation efforts, how they managed the processes, and what they learned along the way. Their responses were eye-opening and confirmed for Kris what she always knew: Empathy was always an important tool in her change management toolkit, and the past few years have made it indispensable.

“One of my biggest lessons from this process is that you have to meet associates where they are,” Kris says. “I am in constant communication with my team to ensure they know they are valued and supported by me, but also that they have access to the training and other resources they need to meet our expectations as a team. Success comes when I remind myself to be engaged, present, and to lead by example—be in it with the team.”

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