WHERE I'VE WORKED
Banking & Finance · Education · Media · Automotive & Mobility · Supply Chain · Energy
Laura Cancellieri
I helped teams see what they
were actually building.
Now I'm building Rafa.
Co-founder and COO. Rafa finds frontline staff through local ads in their social feeds, not on job boards.
SENIOR STRATEGISTFAST PROTOTYPERPLAYS CAREFULLYPATTERN-LEDINTUITION-DRIVEN
CURRENTLY
Co-founder & COO at Rafa. rafa-hr.tech ↗
“I find your frontline staff. You just meet them.”
Rafa, in his own words.
Rafa is a self-serve recruitment advertising platform for frontline jobs, based in Marseille. An employer describes the job and the town. Rafa creates the ad in the employer's own brand, runs it locally on social media and hands over the applications. The hiring decision stays with a person.
WHO IT REACHES
Mechanics, waiters, care assistants, pipe layers. People who are not on job boards but scroll their feeds at night.
MY PART
Co-founder and COO. Product experience, brand and voice, communication, and how the company runs day to day.
Listen. Question. Create. Refine. Repeat.
CLARITY
Stakeholder interviews. Research synthesis. The sentence the team has been avoiding, named on the board in their own words.
ALIGNMENT
Workshop facilitation, decision frames, alignment maps. Disagreements go on the board explicitly, not smoothed over in the meeting.
DIRECTION
What to build next, why now, what to cut. Roadmap input, prioritisation, the tradeoffs nobody wants to write down.
Selected Work
Before Rafa: three engagements where the team knew something was off. The work was figuring out what. Client names redacted.
Modernising a legacy planning platform into a scalable product experience.
CONTEXT
Internal B2B media planning tool used by experienced users, but difficult to adopt for new audiences.
CHALLENGE
Outdated structure and workflows limited usability, adoption and future expansion. The product was functional but strategically constrained.
MY ROLE
UX strategy, research, design sprint facilitation and product experience design.
OUTCOME
- Clearer product structure aligned with modern UX standards
- Scalable foundation for new workflows and features
- Improved usability and onboarding for new user groups
From ideas to evidence: embedding research into product decisions.
CONTEXT
Complex financial environment with many stakeholders and fragmented knowledge.
CHALLENGE
Product ideas were not systematically validated, and research insights were scattered and underused.
MY ROLE
Product experience strategy, research leadership, insights synthesis and organisational enablement.
OUTCOME
- Established an idea validation process
- Introduced an insights management approach
- Reduced redundancy and improved knowledge reuse
- Enabled evidence-based product decisions
Aligning stakeholders through research to enable product direction.
CONTEXT
Multiple teams needed a shared understanding before defining priorities and roadmap.
CHALLENGE
Fragmented stakeholder perspectives risked unstructured alignment and opinion-based decisions.
MY ROLE
Stakeholder interviews, research synthesis, journey mapping and facilitation support.
OUTCOME
- Shared understanding of current-state challenges and opportunities
- Research-informed kickoff and alignment workshop
- Clear focus areas for future roadmap development
Want to know how I did it?
I see everything as play.
Play as method, not tone - iteration, prototyping, pattern-recognition.
BACKGROUND
Product and UX strategy, with a stretch of cross-disciplinary creative work - making something coherent out of people with radically different ideas about what they were building. That's where I learned what no product framework taught me. Sectors keep changing; the work doesn't.
BASED
Marseille and Berlin.
LANGUAGES
FR · DE · EN · IT. Same idea, four shapes.
TRAINED
IDEO U - Activating Strategy · Impactful Presentations · Human-Centered Service Design.
I work best with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves.
Want to talk?
Get in touch.
Write to me about Rafa, or about building something like it. Bullet points are fine, half-sentences better.
EMAIL
hello@lauracancellieri.com
WHERE
Marseille and Berlin.
…or leave a note
CANVAS
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