What if you planned a complete software product lifecycle and create a pool of talented teams / organizational modes that can adopt stewardship of the software at various life stages with the goal to smoothly transition between stages without harming users or workers?

Lets say it looks like this for the sake of argument: stage - organizational mode - goals

    Idea / Proof of Concept - individual or team - prove the idea out
    Growth Software Product - startup - carve a space for the product, grow its useful user base to a target number, transition to Utility
    Utility Software Product - utility - maintain the project and optimize costs and delivered value, transition back up to Growth or down to Archived
    Archived Software Product - library / anthropology - tell the story of the project, minimize costs, make it available to a wide audience, organize its community, transition back up to Utility

The idea is to have a pool of teams and organization templates where you aim to "pass the baton" between modes depending on the lifecycle stage of the software, and individual teams and orgs are rewarded based on how they meet their objectives including delivering a seamless transition to the next stage.

That's very well thought out. Sadly feels overly aspirational when just "keeping the lights on" is often underrated and neglected in many companies. Maybe eventually a good business will have the foresight to think of their organization in terms of different lifecycle stages.

Thanks. I agree that today's profit-oriented organizations are generally unsuited to act out this kind of product-centric methodology. Maybe future nonprofits or DAOs or something could pull it off.