🏆 From Oregon to Patagonia's Product Team

Dara McDevitt is the Global Product Line Manager for Equipment and Accessories at Patagonia, overseeing everything outside of apparel: backpacks, hats, gloves, belts, and the gear built for people who spend their lives outside. Her path there ran through emergency medical response, a broken foot, a backpack factory in Bozeman, a pandemic health department, and a Master's in Sports Product Management (SPM) at the University of Oregon. None of it was planned. All of it built the product leader she is today.

Albuquerque Winters, Yellowstone Summers

Dara grew up in Albuquerque, spending summers in Yellowstone National Park while her parents worked there. Tennis was her sport growing up, serious enough that it structured her early life. But college shifted her direction. She skipped playing tennis competitively and headed to the University of British Columbia, then finished at the University of Montana, chasing proximity to the outdoors instead. "That ended up being this pivot I did," she says, "where I'd been really into tennis and then started to look toward spending more time outdoors."

From Ambulances to Backpacks

Dara's summers in college were spent working for the National Park Service, first as an ambulance driver, later in bear management and search and rescue. After graduating with a degree in resource conservation, she planned to keep working outdoor field jobs. Then she broke her foot. The field position she had lined up fell through, and she needed something else. One of the first offers that came was at Mystery Ranch Backpacks, a technical backpack brand in Bozeman, Montana, hiring her as a production sewer. She had never sewn before. "That was my first job in the sports world," she says. "It really rerouted the rest of my work journey."

Stacking Skills Nobody Plans For

From Mystery Ranch, Dara moved to Goertzen Adventure Equipment, a small leather and canvas goods brand in Missoula, as its second employee. Small teams meant exposure to everything, not just production. At the same time, she was teaching Wilderness First Aid, Wilderness First Responder and Emergency Medical Technician courses on the side, for guides, trail crews, and search and rescue teams.

The two tracks built skills she didn't fully connect until later: hands-on product knowledge and the ability to teach and communicate clearly under pressure. "It was very developmental for my public speaking," she says, "and I was realizing I liked working directly with people."

Betting on Oregon: The Sports Product Management Leap

After years of splitting time between manufacturing and teaching, Dara wanted to learn on the job somewhere new, but nothing worth the move or the pay cut surfaced. That's when she found the University of Oregon’s Sports Product Management (SPM) master’s program. Before committing, she talked to three past graduates to understand what the program actually delivered, not just what it promised. "It felt like a gamble," she says, "but I'd done my homework enough that I thought it would be good." She enrolled in 2018, joining a small cohort that included classmates from Taiwan and Switzerland. The program reframed how she thought about her career, pushing her past mountain towns and into a global view of the industry.

It also gave her a five-person team she still credits directly: one teammate later joined her team at Oboz Footwear. "We got to benefit so much from working together," she says. "I could not have done it by myself." The program's mentorship structure also did more than the cohort alone. Talking through her resume, backpacks, EMS work, wilderness medicine, with mentors in the program helped her see the connections she couldn't on her own. "They helped me connect how it was all connected to each other," she says, a thread she'd later hand back to her own advice for people starting out.

COVID, Oboz, and the Long Way to Patagonia

Dara graduated in March 2020, days before the world shut down. With outdoor product roles frozen, she pivoted into six months at the Missoula City County Health Department, managing COVID response teams across hospitals, schools, and homeless services. "It's the job I bring up in every interview," she says, "because of how directly it impacted people's lives."

When the outdoor industry rebounded, she landed her first Product Line Manager role at Oboz Footwear, then moved to Wild Rye, a women's mountain bike and snow apparel brand, where she helped build its first long-range product roadmap and launched its debut snow outerwear line. From there came Patagonia, a full-circle return to the backpack category where her career began.

Groundedness Over Everything

Asked what trait separates the best people she's worked with, Dara doesn't hesitate: groundedness. "The highest compliment I could give a manager I had was that he was reasonable," she says. "Being able to see the big picture and the details at the same time, that's what lets you make decisions with the information you actually have." It's a principle she now applies as a leader herself.

Trust in the Random Opportunities

Looking back, Dara's advice to her younger self is simple: stop second guessing the winding path. "I felt like there was no method to the madness," she says of her early career. "But retroactively, I've felt the benefits of every random job I've done." Her guiding question now is the same one she'd give anyone navigating an unclear path: are you genuinely interested in how you're spending your time, and who you're spending it with. "That's been the guiding principle for every decision I've made."