Makers #10: Jim Tattersall and Andy Jackson

Huge Atomic Teams (HATs): A new approach to how teams work.

Jim: It took us a long time to get to the HATs model (Huge Atomic Teams, a new approach to delivery that combines elite senior talent with AI agents), but it was always about how we serve clients at the highest level. A few things underpin it. We sell teams, not time and materials. Fixed time, fixed cost, variable scope. And because we work in ecommerce, everything is focused on return on investment and making meaningful changes to the business.

No feat is individual: even a long distance runner has a team behind them. So we got to a place of designing teams that complement each other, balance different personality types, and bring the best out of each other. The same radical candor that exists between me and Andy has to exist within the teams, too. And that only comes from working together, trusting each other and being comfortable being accountable to one another.

We pair the same people with the same clients consistently. Clients become an augmented extension of the team. Some of our clients will say a team member is their third longest-serving employee—they’ve been together so long they’ve built deep domain knowledge; they run faster; they understand the problem set better. That’s where the compounding impact comes from.

Andy: To add to Jim’s point: at Rotateº we always said that we don’t sell websites; we sell partnerships. That distinction matters. About six years ago, after Jim pushed for it, we went through an agile transformation and never really looked back.

It was uncomfortable at first and we’ve tinkered with our ways of working along the way, but now I genuinely can’t picture working any other way. Non-cross-functional working just doesn’t compute anymore. I’ve drank the Kool-Aid. I’m enjoying it. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome. Probably both.

Jim: The cross-functional piece is really important. It’s not craft silos: the team has an objective to solve and everyone brings their background to it. Like me and Andy running a business together—different strengths, different experiences, but one shared challenge. Leading by craft alone isn’t always the clearest path. Your background, your history, even being a musician—all of it colours how you approach problem-solving, and that’s pretty exciting.

Commerce in practice.

Andy: Commerce as an offering is inherently holistic—creative, UX, tech, strategy. You can’t do it any other way, and certainly not well. The people who get nervous about cross-functional working are usually worried about the wrong thing. It’s not the model that’s broken; it’s the phasing.

A good proof point is Rapha. We replatformed them from SAP Hybris to Commerce Layer, embedded into their large in-house team and delivered the project in around nine months, including replanning, because a lot had changed in the year or two they’d been trying to get it off the ground without meaningful progress. Importantly, they adopted our ways of working and we trained their team on it. As far as I know, that’s still how their tech team operates today. That feels like a real proof point.

Jim: Selling partnerships means measuring success differently. Because we work in ecommerce, we can align closely with clients on what success actually looks like—and that usually means measurable commercial impact. We model new features and releases over a full year, using split testing to track statistical significance in revenue uplift. Last year this delivered an average ROI of 1,460%.

It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about value. We’re not a feature factory. You’re not buying scope: you’re buying impact. And that often translates into value pricing. We’ll commit to increasing your turnover by 20% or you don’t pay a certain number. We throw that out pretty regularly now because we’ve built the confidence that that’s the level of impact we can have. Telling a business you’ll grow their turnover by a fifth is a bold thing to say. But that’s generally where we stand going into a new engagement.

And when you’re still delivering that same return in year 10 as you were in year one—that's when you know the model works. We’re passionate about HATs and we’re excited to see what this looks like at a completely different scale.

The partnership.

Andy: Jim and I first worked together on a website for Elton John’s AIDS Foundation. I was at a branding agency and Jim had just started Rotateº. What struck me immediately was that Jim wasn’t a naysayer. His attitude was always that anything is possible. With some clients it became a running joke that we needed to find the boundaries, but for me it was so refreshing.

Being a small business forced me to think holistically. I’m a designer by trade, but I ended up running ops, then growth, then sales. Not natural homes for a creative person, but wearing those hats was good training. It made me a more critical thinker and I think that’s shaped how I approach problems now.

Jim: Our operating styles are polar opposites. I’m high energy, a bit scattered, a Labrador basically—and when I’m locked in, I’m insanely focused. Andy is calm, cool, and collected. We operate so differently and we butt heads constantly. But that only works because of the trust we’ve built over so long.

The candor we have with each other—that level of friction—only exists because we care so much about the work. If we didn’t care, we’d just say whatever. That’s why the partnership has been so enduring. Me and Andy have never been comfortable. We’ve always been wonderfully uncomfortable, constantly challenging each other in pursuit of a better result for clients.

AI, in practice.

Jim: It’s insanely exciting. I always saw code as poetry—the simplicity and elegance of it. And like many engineers, when AI started to rear its head more clearly five or six years ago, there was a bit of existential dread. But at Rotateº we always hired what we called product engineers: people who understood client problems and used their background to add value. That shaped how we approached AI.

One of our engineers is running a Cursor workshop in the Huge offices right now; they’re embedded in the AI community. And the point is that AI allows us to focus on the most humanistic part of what we do. The stuff we were tethered to machines for gets to go away a bit. That’s incredible. It’s enabling us to be more human in our interactions and focus on what we actually love: understanding client problems and solving them.

We’ve always been about client empowerment—building tools that let clients do things without needing us—while we focus on what they absolutely can’t do themselves. Over the last two years we’ve been building systems that supercharge clients, allowing people to do significantly more and grow faster.

So AI is changing things in three ways for us. Massive productivity gains and evolving team shapes to reflect that. More time to interface with clients and understand their problem space as the cost of execution comes down. And the enablement side: building tools that make our clients more effective and help them grow faster.