September 2025 Summaries

High-growth software companies often transition from serving small and medium businesses (SMBs) to targeting enterprises as a strategy to achieve significant scale, despite the associated challenges such as longer sales cycles and heightened security and compliance demands. Companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Gong, Box, HubSpot, and Shopify exemplify this shift, investing heavily in security, compliance, and infrastructure to meet enterprise standards, which in turn facilitates larger contracts and faster revenue growth. Enterprises demand robust product capabilities, including fine-grained access controls and auditability, along with strong operational support, such as dedicated customer success managers and mature processes to handle complex contracts. The shift to enterprise customers presents risks like higher customer acquisition costs and the need for product adaptation, but also promises durable growth if vendors can offload undifferentiated infrastructure and focus on unique product features. In this context, services like Oso provide a unified permissions layer that enables companies to maintain enterprise-grade security and authorization without diverting resources from product innovation, as demonstrated by companies such as Webflow, Intercom, and Productboard.

Oso presents itself as a robust solution for teams needing to transition from WorkOS FGA, which will be discontinued in November 2025, by offering a streamlined migration process that minimizes disruptions and enhances authorization capabilities. With the ability to integrate existing databases and use advanced migration tools like Oso Migrate, Oso facilitates a smooth transition by allowing for centralized control only where necessary and provides a flexible, expressive querying system based on Facts. The platform is backed by prominent investors and trusted by leading companies, ensuring a reliable long-term partnership. Oso's core engine, informed by experts and built to support complex authorization requirements such as custom roles, enables efficient logic writing and querying, which is especially beneficial for startups scaling up. The guide emphasizes building confidence through parity checks during the migration process to ensure consistency and reliability, ultimately providing a clear and efficient path forward for replacing WorkOS FGA.