I'm Yicheng, but most people call me YC.

For the last decade, I've been at IDEO, where I'm a Senior Director leading the healthcare practice: a multi-million-dollar portfolio that accounts for 20–30% of the studio's revenue, across payers, health systems, pharma, medtech, and startups. The work spans care delivery, digital health, and AI, often complex B2B2C products where patient, provider, and payer/employer are all users at once.

Again and again, I've entered complex, regulated environments, read them fast, and stood up capabilities the teams still run: a statewide youth mental health platform, AI products and programs inside some of the largest health organizations in the country, including the clinical accuracy frameworks and human-escalation thresholds that decide when a person takes over. I've led teams through zero-to-one builds, multi-year roadmaps, and the cross-functional work of launching products responsibly. I'm opinionated about what makes healthcare more human and what systemic change that takes, and will happily debate with you on how.

I began my career as a product-minded engineer and still lead that way: user and clinical insights to know what to design, and the builder's instinct to ship it. I'm a player-coach who's grown junior talent into PMs and heads of product.

Earlier at IDEO, I founded the Digital Dream Lab, a creative-technology practice that grew to 50+ designers nationally and helped seed the firm's emerging-tech and AI work.

I've been a Stanford adjunct since 2020, teaching Design for Healthy Behaviors and founding Design for Extended Realities. I regularly speak at conferences, run workshops, and sit on advisory boards.

I hold an electrical engineering degree from Princeton University, where I developed a love of tinkering, building, and breathing healthy doses of solder. In my free time, I make ceramic sculpture and run absurdly long distances.