Outside

At a glance

• Role: Internal engineering lead and product owner, publishing platform
• Timeline: 2019–2022
• Scale: 30 site migrations from three acquisitions, 36 properties, ~5M monthly visitors
• Stack: WordPress multisite, Twig, CircleCI, WordPress VIP, Pantheon, Python import tooling

The situation
Outside was growing fast through acquisitions, bringing in outdoor and adventure publications that each ran on their own stack with their own editorial habits. When I joined, the company had around 45 people and its “core four” websites were in various states of quality. Within a couple of years that headcount had grown dramatically, and the network needed a platform that could absorb new properties quickly without multiplying engineering and hosting costs.

What I did
I pushed for a WordPress multisite architecture early and served as the in-house engineering owner as it came together, working alongside an external design systems team that built out the shared theme layer.

• Migration tooling. Built the content import mechanics with an internal Python developer, which carried 30 sites from three acquisitions onto the platform in under 18 months.
• Developer experience. Set up the local development environment and Bash tooling the team used day to day.
• DevOps and hosting. Owned CircleCI pipelines, deployment, and the WordPress VIP relationship, then led the platform’s move to Pantheon when VIP stopped being the right fit.
• Platform ownership. Acted as day-to-day product owner: running triage across outages, PHP and WordPress issues, and the internal ticket queue, and coordinating with the teams responsible for the membership paywall, video, analytics, and consent tooling.

Outside Watch
Alongside the platform work, I led a cross-functional team of engineers and designers to build and launch watch.outsideonline.com, a greenfield React SPA that drove new subscriptions. I owned requirements, vision, and roadmap with stakeholders and ran the team’s Agile process.

The result
A single publishing platform supporting 36 properties and roughly 5 million monthly visitors, with shared infrastructure and a repeatable path for bringing new acquisitions online.