Paul Sherman

Most research functions produce reports. I build organizational capabilities to deliver the insights that drive tactical and strategic decisions.

The distinction matters. A report is a point-in-time artifact. A capability is a set of processes, relationships, and communication channels that run continuously and bring user evidence into the rooms where the consequential decisions are made.

That means I usually 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.

I also bring something most UX researchers don't: over 25 years of experience researching how people work with computers and automation. My PhD work investigated how pilots and air traffic controllers calibrate trust in and build mental models of automated systems.

That same problem is now the central design challenge of every AI-augmented product. I've researched it from both sides: designing AI features that users can understand and trust, and integrating AI into research operations so humans stay in the interpretive loop. This isn't a recent interest. It's the thread that connects everything I've done.

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, behavioral analytics, and more. I pick the method that fits the question, not the other way around.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.