It's a ton of extremely hard work figuring who you know that knows someone and so on, trying to get someone to intro you to someone else, failing most of the ti

It's a ton of extremely hard work figuring who you know that knows someone and so on, trying to get someone to intro you to someone else, failing most of the time, and so on. The nice thing is once you get the ball rolling a little bit, it seems to roll a little bit easier. Now, another difficult thing is that if you are at a company as a product manager(etc), spending a couple months stalking people on linkedin, writing emails, taking fruitless calls etc, and making no discernable progress, it is unlikely to be tolerated by your manager, the CEO (if small company), dev team (if folks are already staffed etc). So, set expectations, figure a way to show work even if it's not "progress", keep reminding people on a day to day basis, pull some people in for random calls and hit them up for folks in their network, and so on. Good luck. This problem (the org one) is the reason most products don't work. There isn't sufficient work done up front because it's messy work which doesn't yield progress in a predictable way so otherwise good product people write awful PRD's (or equivalent), they know they are awful, but they just aren't given the time to do all the work. On the flip side, if you have domain knowledge and experience in the target industry, you might well be able to write out a doc describing the exact right thing to build in about 3 hours.