[lessaligned]

I arrived at the same wisdom eg. the "Throw Away then Strategize/Plan" process, but... how the heck to you manage to sell/explain this to people at the same or higher levels?

Imo lots of people are very disgusted by this, mainly because the (a) concervatives/waterfall-heads are horrified by the idea of launching something no thoroughly engineered, while the (b) evolutionary-design folks never want a clean-rewrite from scratch, they'll cling to that "throw-away version" and try to "evolutionarily" refactor it gradually into what they now know it will be needed (and this always fails).

[toss1]

Good point - to some degree I got lucky in the organizational area; the situation where it really proved itself was where I was one of four co-founders & I was in the CTO chair.

I can see how it could degrade in the ways you mentioned (and more!) in more mature orgs. Which, to me makes it an even better idea there, but harder to politically navigate.