Things I do when running The Sprawl.
I write my Legwork and Action Clocks so that they are location agnostic or target the team directly. So it will say something like, "Any facility controlled by the corp has armed security posted." OR "Hugo The Butcher personally tracks down the PCs."
I word my mission Objectives in terms of key decisions. So I might say, "When the players decide what to do with the probe, mark XP"
I always assume the players can get paid, just maybe not by their original employer. So, if they go for a double cross you will still roll Get Paid even if that means you get approached by a mysterious stranger who thanks you for serving their interests and will be speaking again with them in the future.
This is because I treat all corps ultimately as omniscient gods. The PCs can't hide from everyone at all times and if I corp doesn't know what you're up to, it's only because they aren't looking. That's why you can write Legwork and Action clocks at all. It don't matter what the PCs do, when they attract attention they WILL find you.
To me, "mission based" and "play to find out" are not at odds. Just slightly constrained. Combined it reads like this, "play to find out how the players do the mission." You give them a mission. Now we play to find out how that goes down. That's The Sprawl.
Hope that was useful.
For missions only this is somewhat true. Never having run a The Sprawl campaign before I fell back into my bad DnD habits of over-preparing (shrugs off remorse about his 80 pages DnD campaign PDF) – especially preparing the How? was a bad mistake – If I know how I want the players to get the thing, I'm not playing to find out, am I?
I ran two one-shots before, where I obviously couldn't over-prepare, since I was going to learn the teams composition while playing – This actually went pretty good, thinking back. Maybe it was because of the type of mission, maybe it was because of minimal preparation. We may never know (probably latter).
For a campaign which isn't just unconnected mission after mission The Sprawl doesn't help you at all I find. The only thing that stays between missions are the Reporter-Clocks, Corp-Clocks, and the characters experience/gear.
There can't be much of a story development, if the players don't get a say, about what mission to do next, and the players can't even decline a mission the GM gives them (well they can, but then it's session over, as I mentioned).
There are some simple hacks around that, like asking your players at the end of each mission:
But it's a hack. The book doesn't include that.
My current intention is very much to run a campaign with meaningful player input for the missions, rather than nothing changing at all in between the missions, except some minor: "Hey, Corp X is at 2300 – Here's me showing you the barrel of the gun".
A few other things persist.
Contacts and how they feel about the PCs
Things that get turned into concrete Threats and become recurring problems.
The fictional state of PC's personal Directives and how those get developed.
Threats in particular are interesting because they build up over time and come and go. They make great unexpected twists.