Finding The Way
Field notes from the frontier
👋 Hi, I'm James Kerr—strategy‑consultant‑turned‑operator now building a handful of experiments at the intersection of AI, skills and growth. Wayfinder is my public notebook: distilled signals, mental models and build‑in‑public lessons for anyone shaping the next decade of work.
The Journey So Far
Startup Operator
Fresh out of uni - dove into product and business analytics at early-stage startups, building data infrastructure from scratch
Regulatory Pioneer
Co-founded company awarded the 2nd license ever granted to a private non-pharma company by UK Home Office for medical cannabis cultivation
MSc Innovation
Masters in Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Management at Imperial College London - graduated with Distinction
Strategy Consultant
Joined top-tier strategy consulting firm - helping Fortune 500s navigate AI & Digital Transformation for their Growth Strategy and Operating Models
Founding Ascend
Building the future of skills verification - where AI agents and humans collaborate to prove what they can do
What I'm Building
Ascend
Self-sovereign skills graph that helps AI-savvy marketers prove what they can do and get hired faster.
Advisory Practice
Helping SaaS founders navigate AI-native go-to-market strategies and build growth engines from first principles.
What You'll Find Here
Strategy Signals
Short, data-backed reads on emerging trends—before they hit the Gartner hype cycle.
- Live market scrape dashboards
- MarTech toolchain teardowns
- Contrarian takes on big-tech moves
AI Futures
Practical breakdowns of how generative AI is rewiring product, growth and org design.
- Code snippets & prototypes
- Implementation post-mortems
- AI-native product patterns
Work Design
Playbooks for building teams where humans and AI agents work side-by-side.
- Incentive model frameworks
- Process mapping guides
- Tooling stack breakdowns
Thanks for reading—see you in the comments.