How do you run several products without several times the work?

Build every product on the same machinery: one stack, one deploy, one backup job, one loop, one checkout, one digest and one inbox. Then a new product only adds the part that's actually new, and you never have 5 different ways of doing the same chore.

The rebuild drill

In my fifth year I rehearsed rebuilding the landlord tool from nothing: pretend the server has gone, rebuild from the backups and notes, and time it. I expected half an hour. It took 6 hours and 20 minutes.

3 things lived only in my head. A morning reminder job I'd typed straight onto the old machine and never written down. A certificate I'd been renewing by hand. An email setting I'd fixed at midnight 8 months earlier and forgotten. Each took an hour or more to rediscover. (Rebuild drills are very good at making you feel foolish.)

What frightened me afterwards was the arithmetic. If one product hid 3 surprises, a portfolio of 5 would hide 15 things only I knew.

The shared pieces

• One stack. The same short list of dull technology, written on one card in my first year and changed twice in 9 years, in January, never mid-year.
• One deploy. The same single command, ending with the new version running, for every product.
• One backup job. Running nightly, the same way everywhere.
• One loop. The queue, the job, the check, the store.
• One checkout. The same payment set-up, refund handling and receipts.
• One digest. One weekly page for the small products, together.
• One inbox. All customer email in one place, labelled by product, read in each product's slot.

Find your duplicates

Where do 2 of your products do the same job in different ways? That's a chore you're doing twice. Run a rebuild drill on your oldest product, and time it. Whatever only you know is a risk you can write down tonight.

The Second Product has the chapter, with a diagram of the pieces. Ship Alone has the stack card.