I did not become a better manager by getting promoted. I became a better manager by standing in front of a classroom.
Before Disney, before Google, I taught full-time at General Assembly. Ten-week immersive UX programs. Five days a week. Students who had left careers in finance, healthcare, and education to start over. They were not kids. They were adults who had taken real risk to be in that room. They deserved more than lectures.
I also taught at Pratt and Parsons. The contrast was instructive. Certificate programs at universities moved slowly. Curriculum that had not been updated in years. Industry had lapped them. General Assembly was the opposite: fast, practical, and constantly in need of rebuilding. I started by picking up lessons that already existed. Eventually I was building new ones, pulling directly from what I was seeing in industry and putting it in front of students the same week.
That pressure to stay current made me a better practitioner. Explaining something simply is harder than explaining it with jargon. If you cannot teach it clearly, you do not understand it well enough.
Teaching is not talking. That was the first thing I had to unlearn.
Effective instruction is about balance. How much time the teacher spends talking versus how much time students spend doing. Too much teacher talk and people zone out. Too much unstructured participation and nobody learns the fundamentals. The discipline is knowing when to model, when to practice together, and when to let someone struggle productively on their own.
I demonstrate. We work through it together. You try it alone. That sequence matters. Skipping steps is where most teaching fails. And most management too.
I also learned about compression checks. Small moments built into a lesson to find out whether people are actually following before you move on. Not tests. Just honest questions. What did you hear? What is still unclear? Where are you stuck? Most managers skip this entirely. They deliver feedback or direction and assume it landed. It often does not.
Before teaching, my feedback was too dense. I tried to say everything at once. I conflated what I observed with what I concluded. I moved to solutions before people understood the problem.
Teaching fixed that. You learn quickly that adults do not retain everything you give them in one session. You learn to sequence. To prioritize. To find the one thing that will unlock the next three things. You learn that the goal is not to transfer what you know. The goal is to create the conditions where someone else can discover it.
That is now how I think about development conversations, performance feedback, and coaching. What is the one thing this person needs to hear right now? What would unlock the next level for them? What am I getting in the way of by saying too much?
I also became a Sprint Master at Google. The training was thin. The facilitation principles underneath it were not. Running design sprints reinforced everything teaching had already shown me: the room does not learn when one person talks. The room learns when everyone is doing something together and someone is creating the conditions for that to happen.
Early in my management career I was not great at this. Scaling through delegation did not come naturally. Having hard conversations was uncomfortable. I held on too long. I over-directed. I cared more about the output than the person producing it.
Teaching broke that pattern. When your only job is to help someone grow, you cannot hide behind the product. The measure of success is not what you shipped. It is whether the person in front of you is more capable than they were ten weeks ago.
That is now how I measure myself as a manager. Not by what my team built. By whether the people on my team are better at their jobs, more confident in their judgment, and more ready for the next challenge than when they started.
Sixty-one UX careers launched from the classroom. A handful of those people followed me back into industry. Some of them are among the best designers I have ever worked with. That is the only metric from my teaching years that I still think about.