Allen Sebastian on the Magic of Bringing Curious People Together
Allen Sebastian was a few minutes late for our meeting. He got held up by a call with a recruiter at Nvidia, where he interned last summer. She wanted to know if he’d be willing to come on board as a full-time employee in the following month. (He said yes.)
Getting hired by one of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies to, as he described on LinkedIn, “solve today’s enterprise AI infrastructure problems” is the highlight of a journey that began in Chennai, India, when Allen, a recent graduate in computer science engineering, realized he was more interested in getting to the root of customers’ problems than in solving them with code.
Back then, he didn’t know what the job he wanted to do was even called. When he found out, he decided to learn as much about product management as he could. But understanding product management wasn’t easy from the outside, and there didn’t seem to be a straightforward path to becoming a PM. “Product management has been around for almost two decades, but it’s ambiguous. The definition of the role isn’t fixed,” he explained.
That ambiguity can lead to misinformation, like the idea that you need to get an MBA to get hired as a PM. Allen never bought into that idea. “I didn’t want to do an MBA so soon after college,” he said. “Why do an MBA when I could do an MS?”
A tweet by a startup founder he admired got him on a less conventional but more rewarding path to learning product management. “I found out about a meetup organized by the founders of The Product Folks and immediately RSVP’ed,” he said. The Product Folks was a brand new community of people interested in or working in product management.
Braving the six-hour bus ride to Bangalore and couch surfing with his uncle to attend the meetup was worth it. The experience gave Allen insight into the world of product managers and a taste of startup culture. “For the first time, I saw people having fun working and solving tech problems. It was like Legoland, like Disney World. I fell in love,” he said.
It also showed him what it was like to learn as part of a community. “I saw the magic they created by bringing people together, people who were curious like me, who had questions and were trying to find something.” Soon after, he joined The Product Folks as one of its first volunteers and established the community’s local Chennai chapter.
Looking to advance his skills in tech, he also applied for Northeastern’s Master of Science in Information Systems (MSIS) degree program. One of the things that attracted him to the program was its interdisciplinary approach. “You get courses on Python, smart contracts, Bitcoin mining. It’s like a bird’s eye view of all things tech.”
The other was the opportunity to build connections and learn from others who are just as passionate about technology, including top leaders in their fields. “Being in the Bay Area gave me access to a network and events,” he said. “I was surrounded by people I wanted to learn from.”
Four years later, Allen has just been hired as a PM, proving that an MBA isn’t the only route to working in product management. If, like Allen, you have a different area that catches your attention, “you can do a Masters in something you actually care about and want to learn,” he said.
Meanwhile, The Product Folks is now a global community — the largest dedicated to product management, with approximately 150 thousand members and over 1,000 volunteers — with Allen as one of the key members.
The community has evolved alongside his career, adapting to his and other members’ needs over time. “When I started, the focus was connecting aspiring product managers to senior product people. During my Master’s, when I started doing interviews for product internships, the community helped me prepare. After I got in, we created a group just for interns. The goal has always been to add value through learning and networking opportunities.”
As he prepares to dive deep into AI in his new role, he realizes he may have to step back from some of his duties at The Product Folks. But he said he’ll always be there for the community that shaped his professional trajectory.