Jump the Shark

Once upon a time, in the latter part of the 20th century, a very successful TV series called Happy Days aired for a decade. In one of its episodes, a leather‑clad Fonzie, who once decided that the most logical thing to do was to water‑ski over a caged shark. In hindsight, critics marked that stunt as the moment the show traded story for spectacle.

That’s “Jump the Shark.”

Software teams did not take long to borrow the metaphor. Each time a product manager adds one more glowing widget that nobody asked for, engineers whisper, “We just jumped the shark.” The corporate slide deck will not admit it, of course. It will call the Next-Gen Synergy Enhancer widget. Everyone nods. Nobody asks what it does.

• The fridge that tweets. When a kitchen appliance can send a selfie of your leftovers to Twitter, you know the roadmap has drifted from nutrition to notification.
• 3D TV. Customers only wanted sharper images. They got cardboard glasses and nausea instead.
• Smartphones with Six Cameras. Four lenses stare into the void, wondering why the user still opens Instagram in low light.

Each item was shipped in glossy packaging that promised “innovation.” Each soon collected dust in a cupboard next to the old 3D glasses, waiting for a yard sale.

AI should have been our redemption arc. Large language models now write prose, generate code, and occasionally invent a new birthday for themselves. Yet the same gravitational pull toward gimmicks has followed them.

Take the year 2025, where 42% of businesses shelved most of their AI initiatives because the projects failed to deliver anything beyond whitepapers and press releases. Some teams built chatbots that could explain a return policy in the voice of a pirate. Others created “sentiment heat‑maps” that turned customer anger into pastel gradients no executive ever read. Meanwhile, real problems, including delayed refunds, missing shipments, and support queues longer than a tax office line, remained unsolved.

At a recent emergency services technology summit, a vendor promised an AI-powered 911 assistant that would “gamify caller triage.” Professionals who save lives for a living asked for reliability, not gamification. The audience clapped politely. Someone tweeted that the demo itself had Jumped the Siren.

Why Sharks

• Metrics over meaning. Vanity metrics, such as “features shipped per quarter,” look great on an earnings call. They do not track how many users finish a real task.
• Innovation theatre. Saying “AI” in a planning meeting is the new “blockchain” from 2018. It sparks excitement even when no one has framed the problem.
• Fear of Missing Out. Leaders would rather chase the shark than explain to the board why they stayed on the pier.

Leave ’em Sharks

• Start with Pain, not Potential. What is the customer unable to do today? If the answer does not require a neural network, resist the urge to use one.
• Prototype like a Pessimist. Assume the feature will fail, then prove it cannot.
• Ship Less, Measure More. Release the smallest change that could help, observe real behavior, and iterate.
• Celebrate Deletions. Killing a useless button saves more user time than adding a new one.

Jumping the shark is a public spectacle. The splash looks impressive in the highlight reel. The cost becomes clear when the ratings drop and the budget disappears. Technology is no different. A product can leap over every buzzword in the sea and still miss the dock where customers wait with mundane, human problems.

Build for those people, not for the stunt. The next time the roadmap tempts you with a glittering yet questionable idea, picture a 1970s sitcom hero in swim‑trunks. Remember how quickly applause turns into syndication reruns. Then put down the water‑skis and write a feature that actually matters.