Jeff Bezos Designs for What Won’t Change: 7 Enduring Truths for OSS / BSS and Telco

Forget what’s trending in telecom. The future of telecom isn’t about what changes. It’s about what never will. It’s not about desperately trying to keep up with all the fads or buzzwords. It’s about delivering the things your customers will never stop expecting.

Why Jeff Bezos Designs Platforms for Stability, Not Speed

Jeff Bezos famously said at AWS that instead of obsessing over what will change in the future, Amazon focuses on what won’t.

Customers will always want low prices, fast delivery, big selection and reliable service. That insight forms the foundation of everything they build.

In telecoms, a similar approach could be transformative. Many telcos are caught in reactive cycles – responding to competitive pressure, regulatory shifts, new tech stacks or the latest AI hype. But what if OSS and BSS strategies were anchored in what customers will always want? Designing for what doesn’t change isn’t about resisting innovation. It’s about focusing on stable, long-term value—and letting those enduring expectations guide architecture, investment, and product design.

This is focusing on the 80% of things at the left-side of the long-tail diagram rather than the blue arrow at the right.

So…. What is it about the telco industry that will never change and how does that inform how we design our OSS?

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What Telco Customers Will Never Stop Expecting

At its core, telecom is a service business and customers have a consistent set of expectations that never shift even when the tech does.

These are the 7 truths that we should be building around:

1. Reliable, High-Quality Connectivity: If the network doesn’t work, nothing else matters
2. Fast and Effective Issue Resolution: Customers want frictionless support that works the first time (probably with the help of a person rather than a redirect to a self-care webpage)
3. Clear, Honest and Accurate Billing: No surprises, no confusion, just fairness and transparency
4. Affordable and Competitive Pricing: Customers expect value for money (and no pricing volatility)
5. Seamless Onboarding and Provisioning: The start of a customer journey should be instant and effortless. First impressions matter in telco as in life
6. Transparent Usage and Plan Limits: Visibility over usage builds trust and control. Bill-shock destroys it in a single bill
7. Trust (in Data Privacy, Security, etc): Telcos are custodians of deeply personal data. As public institutions, they are expected to maintain the highest levels of confidentiality and protection
8. Easy Self-Service and Account Control: Managing your plan should be as easy as sending a message, via whichever channel (or channels) the client feels most comfortable using

These expectations are not optional—they are the baseline. And they’re not going anywhere.

Apart from #8, these expectations have been around since before OSS or BSS were even invented.

So, this is the outward facing view. The end-customer view.

Sometimes as OSS builders, we think about the customer view (ie the telcos and the operators at those telcos) rather than the end-customer view (ie the telcos’ customers / subscribers).

The outward-facing view provides us with the never-changing pillars that we need to build our OSS for. The red-box in the long-tail diagram.

Let’s now take a closer look at how this translates to inward-facing OSS design decisions.

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How BSS Delivers Commercial Consistency at Scale

Each of these customer expectations requires reliable, scalable solutions and associated business processes. That’s where BSS (Business Support Systems) come in:

• Billing Engines: Deliver accurate, itemised billing that customers understand and trust
• Real-Time Charging: Helps customers track usage, especially in prepaid or usage-based models
• Order Management: Supports seamless onboarding by automating complex fulfilment flows
• CRM and Case Management: Enables fast and informed responses by giving support staff the full picture
• Self-Service Portals and Apps: Empower customers to take control of their plans and reduce call volumes
• Glue-ware: Interestingly, the part where it often falls down from an outward-facing perspective is in the integration of the solutions/modules above. If billing engines don’t receive accurate billing records, then they have no chance of satisfying end-customer expectations. If Order Management doesn’t fully instantiate complex fulfilment flows into multiple different network domain orchestrators, then we end up with held orders and delays for customers

When it comes to the internal perspective of building BSS, you’ll notice one thing conspicuously absent from the 7 truths above. Variants / Choices.

Yes, some end-customers want many choices and/or bespoke telco services. Most don’t want more than a few options.

The more choices, the more variants need to be built into the BSS solutions and Glue-ware. The more variants, the less likely we are to provide truths #1 (reliability), #2 (Issue Resolution), #3 (Accurate Billing) and #5 (onboarding)

BSS translates enduring customer expectations into predictable commercial outcomes. It’s how you scale trust (truth #7).

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How OSS Keeps the Network Experience Reliable and Responsive

If BSS handles the commercial promises and the end-customer touch-point, OSS (Operational Support Systems) delivers the technical reality. These systems form the invisible layer that enables every connection, stream, and message.

• Real-Time Monitoring and Self-Healing: Ensure connectivity is not only fast, but always on
• Zero-Touch Provisioning: Gets services live instantly, without manual intervention or errors
• Field Workforce Management: When automation isn’t possible and manual intervention is required, the human resources and managed expeditiously
• Efficient Design and Capacity Planning: When the network needs to be right-sized
• Root Cause Analysis: Reduces downtime by accelerating issue identification and resolution
• Network / Service Performance Monitoring and Predictive Assurance: Uses AI to prevent service degradation before customers even notice
• Security and Compliance Monitoring: Protects sensitive data and reinforces the telco’s societal role as a trusted institution
• Glue-ware and Management Networks

The value of OSS is often invisible, but without it, nothing else works. Truths #1 (reliability), #2 (Issue Resolution) and #5 (Onboarding) are all supported by our OSS. The speed and efficiency of network build and operate also impacts the ability to offer competitive pricing (truth #4).

Once again, the more variants supported by the OSS (which often flow downstream from the number of variants presented by the BSS, such as order types, etc), the harder it is to deliver on these truths.

Instead of feature adding, complexity reduction helps to deliver on the truths influenced by our OSS.

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Designing OSS/BSS Architecture for the Long Haul

The best OSS and BSS strategies are designed not around product catalogues or quarterly targets, but around unchanging human expectations. That means baking customer needs and the 7 truths into:

• Simplifying the product / catalogue structures that reflect what people actually buy (the Whale Curve might help to understand this concept better)
• Simplifying the OSS/BSS stack. Let me ask you – how many applications are in your OSS/BSS stack? If your answer is in the thousands, then maybe you could consider ruthless simplification projects and the Net Simplicity Score (NSS)
• Bullet-proofing E2E Workflows that traverse multiple OSS/BSS solutions and cater for a high proportion of real-life usage and service changes
• Analytics that prioritise workflow completion and customer impact
• Interfaces and automations that reflect how people want to interact with the various available channels

Some of the most successful telcos in the world are those that invested early in simplification measures and customer-aligned systems. Their architectures may evolve, but their purpose remains stable: to deliver what customers will always want – the 7 infallible truths.

In a world obsessed with transformation and feature-adds, there’s power in stillness. There’s power in aggressively refining the few features / factors that really move the needle for customers (and the internal telco teams that support them). By anchoring OSS and BSS strategies around the 7 truths that don’t change, telcos can build systems, and robust businesses, that truly stand the test of time.