Outcomes as a Service - "OaaS"

Nikhil Basu Trivedi, on his excellent blog next big thing, asked fifty top technology thinkers to finish the sentence, "The next big thing next year is..." and got some great results.

I wanted to expound on an answer I love from Garry Tan, which is "Outcomes as a Service".

The next big thing in 2022 is outcomes as a service! People don’t want to buy software. They want someone to make it better cheaper faster with no risk to them. If you couple infinite cheap money to scalable software then outcomes as a service is the biggest opportunity in the world.

I love this framing because it's so pleasingly consumer-centric. People don't want to buy "services"; they only do so because they must purchase a service in order to reach an outcome. Marketers and salespeople know this inherently, but I've never heard it stated so cleanly.

In my world of financial professional services, this is a massive narrative shift away from how we currently price our services. Some outcomes that come to mind in my world are:

• Retire from your job
• Create passive income
• Send your child off to a their top-choice school
• Take your dream vacation without financial worry
• Pay for the care of a loved one
• Harvest a certain dollar value from the sale of your company stock
• Deploy money sitting in cash into a solid & sustainable portfolio
• File an accurate, compliant, data-rich tax return on time, without penalty
• Withhold taxes adequately throughout the year to avoid tax-surprises
• Save time & reduce worry on Sunday nights by delegating financial decisions to a professional

These are a bit less quantitative and measurable than I'd like to see - OKRs are a favorite of mine - but I think they capture the essence of what kinds of creative outcomes we could sell as professionals.