Sam Roehrich

The new article template carrying Outside’s editorial product: long-form stories, gear reviews, affiliate commerce, and reader actions.

• Led the engineering effort to rebuild Outside’s article platform on the headless Next.js frontend — the network’s highest-traffic surface, serving millions of monthly readers
• Shipped the recirculation system powering “Read Next” modules across every article, driving additional pageviews per session and increasing overall engagement
• Built article revenue features including prestitial ad units, viewport-optimized ad refresh, and JW Player video preroll — directly increasing ad yield per article
• Designed the article template as the foundational component for Outside’s editorial product, used across every article render on the network
• Shipped comment preview and recovery flows that deepen reader engagement and improve resilience on the highest-traffic surface

Standalone newsletter subscription and landing pages across the Outside network, with signup flows, analytics, and routing.

• Powered subscriber growth across the Outside Network by shipping standalone newsletter subscription pages with brand-specific designs — expanding the email revenue channel
• Built the newsletter CMS editor in WordPress so editors can launch new newsletters without engineering involvement — eliminating the engineering bottleneck for newsletter growth
• Integrated signup with HubSpot and Rudderstack, creating a fully automated marketing pipeline reaching millions of Outside subscribers
• Owned the product end-to-end: WordPress admin, GraphQL subgraph, Next.js frontend, reverse-proxy routing, and signup analytics — enabling the entire newsletter program to scale reliably

A searchable hub for discounted outdoor gear from retailers readers trust, turning commerce inventory into an editorial product.

• Shipped the Deals Finder, a new affiliate commerce surface generating revenue from outdoor gear sales across 8+ Outside brands (Backpacker, Yoga Journal, Ski, Velo, Run, Climbing, Triathlete, Outside Online)
• Scaled AI-generated product descriptions to thousands of deals with no editorial effort, using build-time generation and PostgreSQL caching — making the inventory cost-effective to maintain
• Built SEO infrastructure (XML sitemaps with lastmod dates, schema.org structured data) driving organic search discovery of deals across every brand
• Implemented affiliate analytics tracking engagement and revenue performance, giving the business real-time visibility into the deals channel

A social feed for the outdoor community at Outside, connecting stories, authors, friends, routes, and synced adventures.

• Shipped the follow system powering creator-audience relationships across Outside’s social feed, driving return visits and logged-in retention
• Designed the gesture-gated analytics layer that became the site-wide standard for coordinating user identity, feature flags, and third-party tracking — a force multiplier the whole platform now reuses
• Built the toast notification system as a reusable web component pattern adopted across all Outside brands for engagement features
• Established the Activity Feed as the default home experience for authenticated users, increasing time-on-site and repeat visits