Uncapped
Joined as Uncapped's first User Researcher and built a customer research practice from zero — open, transparent, and designed so the rest of the team could keep running it long after the engagement ended.
A scaling fintech with strong instincts — and no shared way of knowing what its customers actually needed.
Uncapped was growing fast. Product, design, and customer-facing teams all had hypotheses about what their users needed — but no formal way to validate them, and no shared place where customer evidence lived. Research happened informally, when someone had time. Insights stayed in private DMs.
My remit as their first User Researcher: build a robust customer research process from zero — and design it so transparency was the default, not a workshop afterthought. Three months to lay the foundation, prove the value, and coach the team to keep scaling research after I rolled off.
"We need research to land in the rooms where decisions get made — not stay in a researcher's inbox."
Research designed for transparency. Built to scale beyond me.
The risk with founding-researcher engagements: you become the bottleneck. So I structured the three months around making the process more accessible than I was — open to every team, supported by coaching, and stitched into existing rituals.
Established a robust customer research process involving every team that touched users — product, design, sales, support. Made the workflow visible, scoped, and accessible so research stopped being a private channel and started being a shared infrastructure.
Implemented a transparent outcomes-sharing mechanism — every study, every finding, documented and disseminated where the rest of the team could find it. The fastest way to make research feel valuable is to make it impossible to miss.
Actively contributed to product development by integrating qualitative customer research with the quantitative data Uncapped already had — translating both into product decisions instead of leaving the team to triangulate alone.
Coached team members 1:1 on customer research methods — not so they'd replace me, but so they'd be able to run quick studies independently. The whole point: the practice scales beyond a single researcher's calendar.
Three months. From private channel to public practice.
Setting up the research process
First month was building infrastructure — research intake, recruitment flow, study templates, outcomes-sharing rituals. Made every part of it visible so the rest of the team could see what was being studied and why.
Running studies + sharing in the open
Ran the first set of studies through the new process, mixing qualitative interviews with quantitative signals Uncapped already had. Every finding landed in shared spaces — not a private deck — so the team could engage with it directly.
Scaling beyond me
Final month focused on 1:1 coaching of team members — making sure the practice could grow without depending on a single researcher. The win wasn't another study. It was the team's first self-led one.
Research scales through transparency, not through volume. The faster insights become public, the faster they become decisions.
A research practice the team could keep running.
Three months structured around one goal: leaving Uncapped with a research function that didn't need me to keep working.
Three months. Self-sustaining practice.
I couldn't recommend Cansu more highly. She came to Uncapped as our first User Researcher and instantly got to work transforming our processes to be more open, transparent and accessible. Such a fundamental change inevitably came with 1-to-1 coaching. An exceptional talent — a breath of fresh air who isn't someone who needs to be told what to do, but instead owns their work-stream in order to achieve team goals.