Yi David Yang
Things I do
Things I use
Career trajectory
- Strategic operations: Set design priorities, maintain design roadmap, and navigate cross-functional dependencies and shared design initiatives across products.
- Quality & craft: Established and maintain high standard of design execution while leading hands-on efforts from deliverables such as customer journey maps and detailed Figma UI to design ceremonies such as critiques, research protocols, and product usability backlogs.
- Customer insights: Close partnership with go-to-market functions and customer success to share and collate customer insights and map them to product gaps to deliver value.
- Design system: Scaled and matured Design System paired with engineering to a V1 adoption across 3 products in 6 months and V2 across 4 products in 1 year.
Key impact & revenue protection
Identified $2M ARR churn risk; designed evaluate capacity sidebar securing $400k MRR in month 1 post-release and a 50% year-over-year reduction in churn in March 2026.
- Design systems architecture: Identified the need for a corporate design system, authored the business case, and created the implementation rollout plan.
- Program-level initiatives: Led strategic design workstreams for Media Composer education programs and core e-commerce experiences.
- Cross-functional leadership: Drove stakeholder alignment, communication, and project workstream management across design, product, and engineering.
Key impact
Built a Design system from scratch and hosted in Zeroheight, with full adoption for e-commerce web portal redesign.
Worked in cross-functional Agile team settings. At this point, this was a long time ago, and I’d rather talk about more recent and interesting work. See below.
Things I did
Evaluate capacity sidebar
1. What was the problem?
During our renegotiation and renewal phase, we identified a massive $2M churn risk—around 20% of our total ARR. I validated and diagnosed what was going on by digging deeper into product analytics and pairing that data directly with customer-facing calls. Solar developers were hitting a usability wall trying to evaluate grid capacity.
2. What did I do?
No cookie-cutter UX heuristics necessary here. I created a user journey map using raw product screenshots, revealing our “aha!” moment took 6 clicks and was hidden off-page. I proposed a fundamental engineering rework and proved it was necessary by testing prototypes directly on customer calls, demonstrating a clear path to value in 2 clicks.
Execution took 6 months working alongside 3 engineers to navigate technical trade-offs, scoping down to a sharp MVP strategically timed for a September 2025 industry trade show reveal.
3. What was the impact?
$400k in new ARR signed within month one post-launch. In-app telemetry revealed a 1,200% increase in users reaching success criteria (jumping from 700 to 9,000 flow completions), directly resulting in a 50% year-over-year reduction in churn during our March 2026 renewal cycle.
1. What was the problem?
During our renegotiation and renewal phase, we identified a $2M churn risk—representing roughly 20% of our total ARR. It was clear that enterprise customers were hitting friction, but we needed to understand why before contract renewals came due.
To diagnose the root cause, I bypassed surface-level assumptions and dug directly into our product analytics, pairing quantitative drop-off data with qualitative customer-facing calls. The data showed that solar developers and engineers using Capacity were hitting a massive usability barrier when trying to evaluate substation and grid capacity. The current interface forced users out of context during critical site planning steps, dragging down user satisfaction right when account contracts were up for discussion.
2. What did I do?
Stripping away UX fluff: First of all, no cookie-cutter UX heuristics were necessary here. Instead of running generic audits, I mapped out the entire system and user journey using real screenshots of our existing product.
That exercise immediately exposed the root issue: our product’s primary “aha!” moment took six clicks to get to, and was literally hidden off the page. Users had to fight the interface just to perform the core task they hired our software to do.
Designing & validating a fundamental rework: I started by re-validating the core user value this product needed to deliver. From there, I designed several iterations and different approaches that completely reworked the existing experience.
What I ultimately proposed was a huge, fundamental engineering rework—not just a light UI cosmetic fix. I knew getting buy-in for that level of technical debt would be tough, so I demonstrated it was necessary by validating interactive prototypes directly on calls with customers. Those calls proved both the usability gains and showed an extremely clear, intuitive path to value in just two clicks.
Engineering trade-offs & strategic timing: Execution took six months and three engineers of us getting super into the weeds of engineering trade-offs and compromises. But the cost of not doing this was vastly greater than the technical effort required. We scoped down to a sharp MVP and strategically timed our release for an important industry trade show reveal in September 2025.
3. What was the impact?
Measurable business outcomes & telemetry growth:
- Immediate revenue launch: Market response at the trade show was instant, generating $400k ARR in new deals signed within the very first month of release.
- 1,200% telemetry spike: In-app metrics confirmed massive workflow adoption, showing a 1,200% increase in users reaching success criteria using the new flow vs. the old (jumping from 700 to 9,000 flow completions).
- Long-term revenue protection: Now that this year’s crucial renewal cycles in March 2026 have passed, the redesigned capacity workflow directly drove a 50% year-over-year reduction in churn, protecting our core revenue base.
Design system & engineering partnership
Core philosophy: A design system is a dual-sided resource with a code component that unlocks scaling, speed, and a uniform experience. Success requires a passionate engineering counterpart.
Craft rules: WCAG 2.2 compliance, adapting brand assets so they actually work in functional interfaces, and keeping brand colors distinct from UI functional colors.
AI & future readiness: Structured token architecture makes the system immediately consumable by Claude Code for rapid prototyping.
1. The core philosophy
A design system is a dual-sided resource with a code component that unlocks scaling, speed, and a uniform experience. Success requires a passionate engineering counterpart.
It demands pixel-perfect attention to detail, but that detail means nothing without systems thinking, accessibility, and long-term scalability built into the foundation.
2. The engineering partnership
A design system is completely worthless without an engineering partner who believes in it just as strongly as design does.
For a system to succeed, front-end engineers must take equal ownership—knowing how to architect, document, and maintain a consumable component library that mirrors design tokens and components 1:1 in code. Without that shared conviction, a design system is just an expensive sticker sheet.
3. Standards, color theory & hard rules
To build interfaces that scale gracefully, I hold strict technical standards in my design workflow:
- WCAG 2.2 compliance: Keeping up with WCAG standards to ensure contrast, focus states, and typography are accessible by default.
- A hill I will die on: Brand colors do not equal UI colors. Marketing palettes are designed for attention; product interfaces require legibility, hierarchy, and restraint. Primary brand assets almost always need adaptation before they belong in a functional UI component.
4. AI, design systems & our brave new world
To be honest, I’m still not entirely sure how design systems and AI are ultimately supposed to interact long-term. This landscape is shifting at a breakneck pace—even in the past three months alone.
Luckily, because I set up our design system with clean token architecture and strict semantic naming, it turned out to be immediately consumable by AI coding assistants like Claude Code. Today, I can plug our tokens and component specs into AI workflows to execute surprisingly polished, on-brand prototypes in minutes.
Whether AI becomes the primary consumer of design systems or simply an accelerator for human designers, building a structured, machine-readable system is essential in our brave new world.