Last week, I pitched Penn Labs to students at the annual SAC Fair, our informational sessions, and other recruiting events. Like other student organizations, these events are crucial touchpoints for prospective members. Though, I noticed that my conversations often started with:

Me: Are you interested in joining Penn Labs?

Random Freshman: What's that?

Me: Have you used Penn Course Review, Penn Course Plan, Penn Mobile, Office Hours Queue, or Penn Clubs?

Random Freshman: Yes....

Me: Those are all Penn Labs products!

Random Freshman: WOAHHH!! THAT'S REALLY COOL!

Me: [insert overrehearsed sales pitch here]

It's at this point that I realized that Penn Labs is unique in that people learn about our work before they learn about our club. This is a realization that was two years in the making and underlies some key things that I've learned about my time at Penn Labs.

1. Product direction is a function of the user and their experiences

I joined Penn Labs in Spring 2024 as a member of the iOS team. This gave me the opportunity to work on Penn Mobile. After onboarding and completing an introductory project, I remember struggling to find something to work on. My team leads at the time, Jordan and Anthony, looked at me (after my intro project crashed Penn Mobile and they had fixed it) and essentially said:

Anthony and Jordan: Don't worry about it, that's normal. Just find something that you don't like and make it better.

By giving me a lot of latitude in deciding what to work on, my lens of product direction shifted from that of a prospective software engineer to that of a user. Furthermore, this opened my eyes to the motive behind Penn Labs' products at large: find something that people find difficult and make it easier.

Product direction has always been a challenge for me. It's a tough call deciding what things to tackle first, what problems are worth solving, what ideas are worth acting upon. However, my time in Penn Labs has taught me that it's all about the user. Building cool products is fun, exciting, and impactful largely because there's someone on the other side whose life is made better by them.

As an iOS developer, it feels right to quote Steve Jobs on this one:

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology."

- Steve Jobs, WWDC 1997

So how do we decide what to work on? Simply put, we put our Penn student caps back on and think about the challenges we face. For one, degree planning is consistently a challenge here at Penn. We're working on it (I promise). But it's those types of challenges that stand out as unbelievable product ideas; the allure of solving a problem that just one student faces is all too common among our talented team members.

2. Writing code isn't the entire picture

After spending a year on the iOS team, I moved up to the role of iOS team lead. I was still developing Penn Mobile, but I was interacting with many more product teams at a much deeper level. It's here where I realized that these interactions are the not-so-apparent responsibility of a team lead. Simply put, interacting with product teams, students, and other stakeholders is just as much a part of the role as is writing the code, leading your team, and solving the problem.

Penn Labs is so much more than a team of software engineers. We have members whose talents are in infrastructure management (which is largely software, but also operations/cost analysis), user interface design, social media marketing, and product management. To remain in one's bubble—that is, to focus only on the software—goes against everything we do well as an organization. There's a reason that our products are discovered before our club: the efforts needed to make that product effective, easy-to-use, and well-marketed took genuine talent that is largely the result of the interaction between these different teams (and the skills of those teams themselves). Penn Labs is a melting pot of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences so far beyond, and including, the Penn sphere.

Another overlooked part of the job is the relationships. We have worked tirelessly to maintain relationships with our various stakeholders: advisory boards, Penn administrators, Penn IT, and foremost: Penn students. While writing code is paramount to show potential value, being able to speak about impact and results to those who support your work is also fundamental to the work we do and the effect we have on the Penn experience.

Writing code is not the entire picture. In fact, it's naïve to look at our organization as a group of software engineers. The products we build are a result of inter-team conversations and debates, the cultivation of productive relationships with stakeholders, and genuine talent and care by the students who volunteer to make these products for the Penn community.

Conclusion

I'm going into my stint as the co-director of Penn Labs for the next year. I'm excited further this direction and mindset, and I'm also excited to bring on new members who align with this. With that, our application is open on Penn Clubs (which is cool since it's our product). So if anything I wrote here resonates with you, apply.

My experience at Penn Labs has been enlightening. It's been a ton of fun learning from the talented members around me who are excited to show me how cool the work they're doing actually is.

As I said, we work hard to cultivate a relationship with Penn students and other stakeholders. If you have comments about our work or ideas, reach out to us at contact@pennlabs.org.