How do you keep small products from being forgotten?

Give your small products one shared page, read every week at the same time: what changed, what's waiting, and a line for every fault that once reached a customer. Small products need very little attention, but they need it regularly, and "very little" slides into "none" without anybody deciding it.

The blank reports

My bookkeeping report had its moment early. A woman who trains bookkeepers mentioned it in her newsletter, and for 2 weeks strangers arrived faster than I could answer them. It's the only time anything of mine has spread on its own. Because it was doing well without me, I stopped looking.

In its first year I made a change that removed a column from its database, in the same release that stopped writing to it. I thought nothing used it. A monthly report did. On the 1st of the next month, 3 customers opened their reports and found them blank. They told me before I noticed.

The backups held 7 days, and the column had gone 9 days earlier. I rebuilt their reports from their own source files over a weekend, and 2 of them had to send me those files again. (Bookkeepers are mostly decent about it. They've seen worse.)

I'd been looking at that product's dashboard almost daily. I hadn't seen it, because a dashboard shows you what you thought to put on it.

The Thursday page

On Thursday evenings I read one page about my 3 small products. For each: what changed this week, what's waiting for me, and a line for every fault that once reached a customer, checked again. The blank reports are a line on that page now. When a fault reaches a customer, its check joins the page that week.

Make yours

Ask what went wrong last in your smallest product, and what would catch it now. Write that line first. Then add what changed and what's waiting. Read it at the same time every week.

The Second Product has the chapter.