I was in a session last week and a participant came up with a great line – learning as a service. L&D already operates like bad SaaS but most people in L&D just don’t know what that means yet.

SaaS stands for Software as a Service. The “as a service” part is important – it often means a product is never finished. Users can use what they want at that moment in time and then leave. It means adoption, retention, and ongoing value aren’t nice-to-haves but the business model. A SaaS company with 20% activation and zero return visits is a company with weeks left.

Most SaaS companies that confuse content production with service design don’t survive long enough to fix the mistake. Low adoption, no retention, and users who disengage the moment they have a choice.

L&D has the same problem. It just doesn’t have the same feedback loop.

L&D’s numbers would end most SaaS businesses. Courses completed once and never revisited and content built around what the business wants to say, not what users need to do. Attendance is mandated, so nobody churns; no churn means no signal, and no signal means no pressure to improve.

The captive user is the problem. When people can’t leave, you never find out whether what you built was any good.

The fix isn’t better content, and content production is the wrong frame entirely. Service design asks different questions: not “what do we need to teach?” but “what do people actually do when they need to get better at something, and how do we fit into that?” It treats learners as users with agency, not recipients of a syllabus.

SaaS companies that get this right build around user behaviour. They instrument everything and watch where people drop off. They iterate and earn retention as a result.

L&D can do the same: the tools exist and the methods exist. What’s missing is the willingness to accept that a mandate is not the same as value.