Mirrors: Nadera Rahman, Product Manager
The AdaMarie Mirrors reflect back to us the many roads (often winding, never smooth) to success! Real stories to see yourself reflected. At first, you’ll see Nadera in this mirror, but eventually, we hope you’ll see yourself.
Welcome, Nadera Rahman!
Nadera Rahman didn’t have a five-year plan when she graduated from Bryn Mawr with a degree in urban planning. In fact, when she walked up to the Vanguard booth at a job fair, she was mostly looking for a job.
That first opportunity turned into a career she couldn’t have planned: from the call center to RFP writing, project management, and eventually product management. Today, Nadera leads the mobile customer experience at Vanguard and manages a full-stack engineering team, building products that help millions of people navigate financial systems.
Her path is a good reminder that careers rarely unfold in a straight line. Sometimes you discover what you’re good at by saying yes before you have the whole picture.
In this AdaMarie Mirror, Nadera reflects on the experiences that shaped her career, the questions she learned to ask along the way, and what it looks like to build a career when the path becomes clearer as you go.
Major & Minor – If you went to college!: Urban Planning
Field of Work: Product Management
Expertise In: Financial Services
Current Company: Vanguard
Job Title: Product Manager- Mobile Platforms & Personalization
One-liner about what you’re working on: I lead the messaging and nudge journey for Vanguard's mobile app where I focus on enabling personalized journeys that support user's financial goals.
Currently geeking out over: The entire crew of the Artemis II space expedition. They reignited my wonder for vastness and beauty of outer space.
STEM Hero: Jane Jacobs
Tell us about your professional journey – how did you get where you are now?
My path into my career today, while it has been refined and focused over the years, did not start out that way at all. I went to Bryn Mawr College, just outside Philadelphia, where I studied the growth and structure of cities - how people move through urban landscapes, how services get distributed, who gets access and who gets blocked. As graduation neared, I went to a job fair on campus and got connected with a representative from Vanguard. The client-facing part of the role sounded exciting, and truthfully, I just wanted to be employed somewhere. I accepted an entry-level position with virtually no idea what the job actually entailed.
In 2015, I started as a brokerage associate in the call center, servicing accounts and talking with everyday investors about their portfolios. From there I moved into writing RFP responses for large-market retirement plans, translating complicated financial solutions into something a committee could actually evaluate. That turned into project management, where I ran intake and prioritization across business units and led the rollout of an enterprise workflow platform. And in 2024 I moved into product, where I now own strategy and delivery for Vanguard's mobile customer experience and lead a full-stack engineering team through two-week sprints.
Looking back, the path was both fortuitous and intentional. I did not start out with a plan, but I can see now that I kept reaching for the same thing. I loved studying how people navigate systems they did not design. I now spend my days building mobile experiences that guide millions of people through retirement systems, financial decisions, and moments that genuinely matter to them.
We’re also curious to know your personal story and upbringing. What has made you “you”?
I am a first-generation American, and a large part of who I am is rooted in growing up as the child of two hard-working immigrants who possessed the tenacity and drive to carve out a new life for themselves and their children. They built a full, genuinely happy life for me and my sisters, where they taught us to value honesty, hard work, and community above all.
That’s probably why Bryn Mawr felt like a natural fit. At a women's college, women's voices are the ones you hear in every classroom, women hold every leadership position, and community comes first - and it set my expectations for what the right room should feel like. Outside of work, it is still mostly the same things: family and friends, traveling to understand the world a little better, and gathering loved ones around a dinner table.
We know that real life isn’t a smooth and linear journey. What was your initiating moment that led you to your calling - can you tell us about that moment, what helped you moved forward, what you learned/discovered?
I lead a full-stack engineering team and I am not an engineer. Early on, situations like that felt like a problem I needed to hide. I would nod along, write the concept down, look it up later. What changed things was realizing that the question I was too embarrassed to ask was almost always the question three other people in the room also had. The first time I asked it out loud, the conversation got better. Not worse.
That reframed the whole thing for me. I am never going to be an engineer, and I stopped trying to think like one. What I am is the connector - the person holding the pieces from engineering, design, compliance, and the business, and assembling them into a strategy that actually holds together. The questions that feel dumb are how I do that. They are what surface the assumption nobody said out loud, or the gap between what one team thinks it is building and what another team thinks it is getting.
So my value was never going to be knowing the most. It was going to be being the person willing to stop the room and ask the question. So while I still sometimes feel that flicker of hesitation, I have just stopped letting it win.
You’re a working person in a performance-driven industry. Where do you find balance?
What works for me is protecting the things that actually refill me and not treating them as the reward for finishing everything, because it can often seem like the work is never finished. For me that mostly means sticking to the boundaries I set for myself. I try to set aside designated relax and recharge time for myself- where I can cook a new recipe, catch up with a friend, or veg out completely and binge a TV show with no Teams notifications in sight.
Let your geek flag fly! If you were a scientific phenomenon, what would you be?
I think I would be translation! The part where a cell reads the instructions and actually builds the thing. The information is already there, it's just in a form nobody can use yet, and nothing happens until something converts it. That is my entire job description, honestly.
We’d love to feature your work! How can we spread the word about what you’re doing?
The best place to find me is LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/nadera-rahman). I'm always happy to talk with people navigating a pivot into product or into tech from a non-technical background, and informational conversations are genuinely how I ended up here - this feature included!
Do you have a favorite motivational quote or song?:
"If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else."- Toni Morrison. It's a good reminder that getting somewhere is only half of it.
Any final advice for early-career STEM professionals?
Give yourself permission to be wrong about what you want. The version of you that picked a major at nineteen had very little information. It's not a failure to want something different as you learn and grow.
