Has your product ‘jumped the shark’?
Product leaders are easily persuaded that their product is the best. I worked in a big corporate company who kept polishing the old operating system. Despite it never matching new competitor products entering the market. They just couldn’t end its life.
‘Jumping the shark’ is a term describing a TV show that has past its best. The term comes from an episode of the very successful Happy Days, where a scene depicts Fonzy, a protagonist in the show, jumping a shark on water skis. The show was never considered as good after this the 3rd episode in the 5th season.
The phrase was coined by Jon Hein, a radio personality. Who in 1997 created a website called jumpTheShark.com, that aimed to define when a TV show had past its best. The website was sold in 2006 for $1million dollars. The URL now points to TVguide.com in its own little jump the shark irony. 1Another layer of irony, is mocking the website that would have been a really useful resource to write this post.
In mid-2004, Friends, one of TV’s most successful ever shows, ran for the last time after two hundred episodes. It had become so expensive that the network felt it couldn’t justify paying for more, also some of the actors, writers, and staff involved were keen to move on. Everyone who worked on the show was emotionally prepared for an ending. This bled through into the final episode, leaving viewers feeling things were not resolved at all well, with poorly-crafted knee jerk conclusions to stories. It had ‘jumped the shark’ because no one could bear to put it out of its misery.
More recently, Curb Your Enthusiasm ended2 after 120 episodes. Apparently it has tried to die on a few occasions before, but been resuscitated. This time though the end was a good one. At least according to the Guardian review “Curb Your Enthusiasm finale review – an absolutely perfect ending”
How the end comes…
Businesses sometimes ignore the inevitable end of their outdated offering. Peter Drucker, the famous business writer and acknowledged founder of business consultancy, describes how many businesses fail to see the coming end. He lays out this theory in three parts.
First, there are assumptions about the environment of the organisation: society and its structure, the market, the customer, and technology.
Second, there are assumptions about the specific mission of the organisation.
Third, there are assumptions about the core competencies needed to accomplish the organisation’s mission.
One of those approaches he calls abandonment.
Systematic abandonment
“Every three years, an organisation should challenge every product, every service, every policy, every distribution channel with the question; If we were not in it already, would we be going into it now? By questioning accepted policies and routines, the organisation forces itself to think about its theory. It forces itself to test assumptions. It forces itself to ask: why didn’t this work, even though it looked so promising when we went into it five years ago? Is it because we made a mistake? Is it because we did the wrong thing? Or is it because the right things didn’t work?”
Certainly the big company I worked for didn’t have these conversations. Many of the senior management had emotional ties with the OS that meant they couldn’t do the impartial analysis that Drucker endorses.
Endings are often very emotional. Either the potential of an end happening or the process of its transition. Frequent discussion of the end of a product is healthy for a company and its product development team. Without theses discussions endings become an enormous burden when they need to be delivered.
The best approach is talking about the end, often and seriously.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
2 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/apr/08/curb-your-enthusiasm-finale-review-an-absolutely-perfect-ending?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
