Paula Guntaur
“I help teams get past the 'stuff and things,' the first layer of data, opinions, and quick answers, to understand what customers really want, need, and struggle with.”
At Sprig
Paula hosts Sprig's dinners and roundtables for researchers in the New York area, helping build the research community. She also writes about research practice, from choosing the right kind of research for a question to getting teams to actually use a target customer.
As Head of UX Research at Tripadvisor, she built and scaled the team, with workshops and a competency matrix to support career growth.
She led a global customer segmentation at Tripadvisor and worked with Brand to put the target segment into dashboards, tools and workflows across the company.
Working with Research Ops, she launched a community board that grew to 5,000+ members in six months and cut recruiting cycles from weeks to days.
She created an Insight-to-Impact GPT, tested new AI tools, and oversaw a research repository with AI-powered search.
Focus areas
- Foundational research
- Research ops
- AI workflows
- Customer segmentation
- Research systems at scale
- Inclusive research
Education
Press & awards
Background
Paula is a UX research director and consultant with a multidisciplinary background in interaction and industrial design. She has built and led research teams at Tripadvisor, Scholastic and FiftyThree, and now runs Stuff & Things, a research consultancy, alongside her work with Sprig.
Her work spans foundational research, research ops and AI workflows, with clients in education, productivity, technology, sports, healthcare and travel. She writes about research practice, including a framework for choosing the right kind of research for the question a team is facing.
Career
- 2026 to present
Sprig
Research Partner
- 2026 to present
Stuff & Things
UX Research Consultant
- 2021 to 2025
Tripadvisor
Head of UX Research
- 2018 to 2021
Scholastic
Design Research Director
Join the conversation
Sprig hosts dinners, summits and virtual sessions for research and insights leaders in cities across North America.