Vestmark Interview Paper

Our group interviewed Mr. Costello, a project at manager at Vestmark Inc., to learn about the company and its culture. Vestmark is a technology provider in the wealth management industry with its main location in Wakefield, MA and an additional office in Jersey City, New Jersey. Though small, the company, which currently employs about 200 people, is growing rapidly in the niche market that offers software as a service. Vestmark’s competitive strategy is to provide not only its core product, VestmarkONE, an automated investment platform, but also offer ancillary services that help the company compete against other firms and capture a greater market share.
Vestmark’s vision, as outlined on its website, is focused on creating a premier technological

One such consideration is the coordination among individual employees and work units. As explained by Steven McShane in his text Organizational Behavior, effective coordination is an important component of an organization’s structure because it can reduce the extent to which the efforts of employees are duplicated, mistimed, or misaligned with its goals. In our interview with Mr. Costello, he revealed that at Vestmark there is a definitive formal hierarchy, a system in which individuals are assigned legitimate power to allocate resources, and that he, as a project manager, has superiors to whom he reports as well as subordinates who report to him. An example that he provided of such a relationship is the regular meetings that are held between all project managers and the CEO, President, Head of Sales, and other senior management. Discussion at these meetings is focused on the progress of critical tasks and how they are meeting the needs of key clients. While formal hierarchies, as McShane explains, can reduce the speed and accuracy of communication within an organization, meetings such as the one described by our interviewee can help reduce these limitations of this form of coordination. Mr. Costello expressed no concern over the communication within Vestmark and could not see a way that it could be