How WHOOP Built Specialized Panels to Expand Personalized Health Data

Why WHOOP Developed Specialized Panels

WHOOP, the human performance company, has been answering people’s questions about physical fitness and wellness for more than a decade, but recently, its teams realized that some questions were still being left unanswered. 

Enter, Specialized Panels.

Following the 2025 launch of WHOOP Advanced Labs, which is a feature that combines clinical blood testing with WHOOP health data to offer a more complete picture of an individual’s health, the company’s members asked for more biomarkers, greater clinical context and answers to questions the baseline panel couldn’t fully address related to areas like hormones, cardiovascular risk and metabolic health.

So, the WHOOP tech teams developed Specialized Panels, working closely with the company’s lab partner, Quest Diagnostics, and its internal clinical team to design five focused panels: women’s health, men’s health, heart health, metabolic health and performance health.

“The launch represents the next chapter of WHOOP Advanced Labs: not just bloodwork, but a way for members to get personalized clinical insight on the parts of their health they care most about,” Staff Product Manager Ingrid Hartman said.

 

“The launch represents the next chapter of WHOOP Advanced Labs: not just bloodwork, but a way for members to get personalized clinical insight on the parts of their health they care most about.” 

 

WHOOP Advanced Labs expands the data ecosystem of WHOOP beyond the health snapshot that bloodwork provides, addressing contextual elements that may affect results, such as whether a person is lacking adequate sleep or engaged in strenuous exercise the day prior to the blood draw. In other words, it’s redefining how people take charge of their health and, in turn, unlocking new possibilities for WHOOP. 

“My hope long term is this helps WHOOP redefine expectations for what personalized health data means and help facilitate the access to that experience for more people,” Healthcare Product Associate Jared Ryder said.

 

 

The Making of WHOOP Specialized Panels: Teamwork, AI and HPML

Nearly every team at WHOOP played a key role in creating Specialized Panels, including Senior Software Engineer Junyi Fang’s team, which builds new features and experiences for WHOOP members. 

Fang and her teammates partnered with the WHOOP AI team to create a panel recommendation agent. This agent is powered by an advanced AI prompt that ingests a member’s WHOOP data and helps them pick a panel that matches their goals. 

For Fang, one of the most compelling aspects of this undertaking was using Hyper Prompt Markup Language, a templating language purpose-built for dynamic, composable LLM prompts. 

“Using HPML gave us a lot more flexibility in how we structured the prompts, and that allows us to generate panel recommendations with richer user context,” Fang said. “It also sped up the agent runs with fewer tokens.”

The teams involved in the development of Specialized Panels created an internal evaluations framework to validate the agent’s recommendations against clinical best practices before exposing it to members, which Fang described as a “meaningful investment in trust and safety on top of the AI itself.” They also deepened the company’s integration with Quest Diagnostics to support the expanded biomarker set while preserving the turnaround times members expect. Every report provided to members is also always reviewed and approved by a licensed clinician.

In addition to leveraging user feedback to define the exact composition of Specialized Panels, teams relied heavily on each other’s expertise throughout development. According to Ryder, WHOOP fosters a culture of “laying it on the table” in terms of idea-sharing, and by allowing this to occur early on in the project, they were able to tease out thought experiments before committing to an idea. It also helped that employees, being largely health-conscious individuals, were eager to offer internal feedback. 

“Having individuals at WHOOP readily available and willing to experience what we were building added an iterative feedback loop that kept us on the balls of our feet as opposed to a steady march to an unchanged destination,” Ryder said.

 

Related ReadingWHOOP Company Culture: Behind the Scenes of the ‘Most Ambitious Launch’ in The Company's History

 

 

Technical Challenges in Building WHOOP Specialized Panels

For Hartman, one of the biggest challenges WHOOP teams faced during the development of Specialized Panels was scaling depth without amplifying complexity. 

“We were significantly expanding both the number of biomarkers and the sophistication of our clinical analysis, and the natural risk was producing something that felt more like a medical report than a WHOOP insight,” Hartman said. 

They made hard editorial decisions about what to surface up front, what to summarize, and what to layer into deeper views, therefore protecting the simplicity that members expect while honoring the clinical rigor the data demands. It was an experience that taught Hartman and her peers an important lesson.

“When you move from a single offering to a portfolio, you have to invest in information architecture as much as in the data itself,” Hartman said. “Simplicity at scale is both a design challenge and a content challenge.”

Another watch-out was the cutting-edge nature of what the company aimed to do, which involved connecting clinical healthcare domain expertise with rapidly unfolding AI architecture in a “company full of dreamers.” 

“There were many times we’d want to run with an idea or build in some feature that at the time did not have the scaffolding to support it,” Ryder said.

To overcome this, teams leaned heavily on cross-functionality and honest communication to understand what was possible to build and who had the ability to create it. This cohesion became the cornerstone of the project. 

“Having other teams share in the passion our healthcare product team had for this project created a group of individuals actively searching for ways to improve,” Ryder said. “I think we would have ended up with a very different feature if the experience were siloed.”

 

 

How Working on Specialized Panels Supported Employee Growth

The launch of Specialized Panels was a major moment for WHOOP — and its people. 

Fang said that the launch helped her grow into a leadership role, allowing her to work beyond system designs and code-writing. Throughout the project, she owned the technical direction of the feature and kept teams aligned, requiring her to embrace a mindset shift. 

“I pulled my head up from the day-to-day development work and started thinking about how all pieces fit together, what could go wrong a few steps ahead, and how to help the team move in a productive way,” Fang said.

Ryder’s involvement in the project amplified the “already really positive” experience he’s had at WHOOP, underscoring the strength of its culture and its people. 

“It’s hard work; you’re surrounded by people also working hard, and sometimes it feels like a task is insurmountable,” Ryder said. “But then you might have a coffee chat with someone working on a distinctly different project that links a connection in your mind, and suddenly, a new possibility has opened up.”

The launch of Specialized Panels is an exciting milestone for the WHOOP teams. Hartman said that members have already shared how Specialized Panels has helped them take greater charge of their health, and she’s eager to see the company change even more lives in the future. 

“This launch is just the first step in expanding WHOOP Advanced Labs and incorporating more useful testing modalities over time,” Hartman said. “Our end goal is to become the HealthOS for every WHOOP member — the single source of truth that lets a member see a cohesive view of their health and understand exactly which behaviors will move the needle. There is much more to come.”

 

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