Paul Sherman

Research that sits in a slide deck doesn't help anyone. The value of user research is measured in decisions made better and faster, risks identified before they become expensive, and product directions validated before engineering commits.

Here's what changes when a senior researcher is embedded in your organization:

• Decisions get grounded in evidence, not opinion. Product and engineering leads stop debating what users want and start working from what users actually do. Roadmap conversations shift from HiPPO-driven to evidence-driven.
• Cross-functional teams align faster.Research becomes a shared language across product, design, and engineering. I've spent my career translating between technical and non-technical stakeholders, building the trust and facilitation muscle that makes insights land in the right rooms at the right time.
• Your AI and automation features get built right the first time. I bring 25+ years of studying how people calibrate trust in automated systems, from aviation flight decks to enterprise AI. That means fewer costly redesigns when users can't understand what your model is doing or why.

Research becomes a capability, not a cost center. Instead of commissioning one-off studies, you get a system: recurring insights wired into your decision-making cadence, stakeholder relationships that sustain themselves, and a research practice that compounds over time.

I work at three levels in parallel:

• Project:I design and lead discovery activities, and conduct (sometimes scrappy, sometimes rigorous) mixed-methods research that triangulates people's behaviors, goals, and attitudes with quantitative analytics data.
• Operations: I build the processes, tools, and stakeholder relationships that make research a recurring input to product decisions rather than a one-off event.
• Strategy: I bring insights and evidence to leadership to enable decision-making with a full picture of the accompanying risks and opportunities.

My methods span the full research spectrum: discovery and design sprints, contextual inquiry, in-depth interviews, jobs-to-be-done analysis, journey mapping and service blueprinting, persona definition, usability testing, survey research, and behavioral analytics. I pick the method that fits the question, not the other way around.

I've worked across healthcare, fintech, legal tech, insurance, telecommunications, procurement, and enterprise SaaS. The domain matters less than the complexity. I do my best work in products where the problem space is tangled, the stakeholders are many, and the path from evidence to action requires translation across teams.