Hiring and Onboarding Remote Employees

Your workflow documentation describes the happy path: a ticket arrives, gets categorized, routes to the right team, and gets resolved. Real workflows fail at the transitions. A P1 incident escalates from the service desk. Your engineering team sees it for the first time days after the customer reported it. The ticket shows three status changes, two reassignments, and zero context about what’s been tried. The customer’s last update reads: “Still broken. This is unacceptable.” You’re about to spend your evening reconstructing days of troubleshooting from Slack messages and email threads because someone, somewhere, marked the ticket as “in progress” without documenting w…

Roadmaps speak in quarters and outcomes. Sprint boards speak in points and tickets. The gap between them is where promises die. Checkout redesign was Q2’s top priority in the roadmap. It’s not in the next three sprints. The mobile app initiative shows “In Progress” on the stakeholder deck but hasn’t been broken into epics. Enterprise features are Q4’s focus, but nobody on the engineering team seems to know about them. This disconnect isn’t a communication failure. It’s a structural problem: roadmaps and sprints operate on fundamentally different timescales with different information quality. Context switching between these altitudes costs hours. It takes 23 minute…

Sprint planning is where PM preparation either pays off or falls apart. Teams that make decisions in under an hour see a 68% success rate; those taking over five hours drop to 18%. The difference often traces back to one question: did the PM arrive prepared? The engineering lead asks which backlog items are highest priority. Two don’t have acceptance criteria. The third depends on a design that hasn’t been reviewed. Forty minutes of the session disappears into requirements discussions that should have happened days ago. For PMs, the challenge isn’t understanding agile ceremonies. It’s knowing what to contribute, what to leave alone, and how to stay informed withou…

Workflow integration software is no longer an option. It’s a necessity. The average organization used 106 SaaS apps in 2025. That means your workflows go through multiple platforms by default, with essential data scattered across them. But dig a bit beyond that number and you’ll find another story. That average actually went down — from 113 — since 2024. What does that mean? More and more organizations are realizing that just adding tools to their stack doesn’t solve all their collaboration problems. They’re trying to cut down on redundant platforms and streamline the way they work. But removing tools isn’t the only way you can do this. Workflow integration softw…

Only 6.4% of features drive 80% of user engagement. The other 93.6% represent misallocated effort, features that seemed important during prioritization but turned out not to matter. This isn’t a prioritization framework problem. Most teams have frameworks. They run RICE scoring, debate impact estimates, and leave planning sessions with clear priority orders. Three weeks later, engineering is working on something that wasn’t even in the top ten, and nobody remembers why. Prioritization frameworks solve the wrong problem. The hard part isn’t deciding what’s most important. The hard part is making those decisions persist through the chaos of execution. Priorities liv…

The backlog was supposed to be a list. One list, one tool, one source of truth. Reality diverged. Feature requests arrive through Zendesk tickets. The sales team drops customer feedback in Slack. Executives add strategic initiatives to an Asana project. Your PM tool tracks validated opportunities. The engineering backlog in Jira is supposed to reflect all of this, but it reflects whatever someone last remembered to copy over. Managing a product backlog now means consolidating input from half a dozen sources, making prioritization decisions across different contexts, and ensuring that whatever ends up in front of engineering has enough information to actually build…

Your engineer just shipped a Slack app that surfaces ServiceNow tickets in relevant channels. It took three days to build. Six months later, ServiceNow changed their API versioning structure, your Slack workspace reorganized, and the engineer who built it is on a different team. The integration still works, mostly, but no one’s entirely sure how the error handling works, and there’s a growing list of edge cases in a Notion doc somewhere. This is the moment you start looking at integration platforms. Not because you can’t build integrations, but because you’re already supporting too many of them. The conversation that follows usually splits along predictable lines.…

Microsoft Azure DevOps is a key tool for software development teams managing code changes, testing and deploying processes, reporting, and managing projects. ServiceNow is a premiere IT management platform with a wide range of use cases, but in the context of an integration with ADO, we’re going to focus exclusively on ITSM in this article. So, imagine a scenario where a customer or internal user encounters a problem with your company’s app or service. This incident is reported to the IT service desk, who creates an incident in ServiceNow. All the details are in that incident, but the dev team works in Azure DevOps to actually make changes to the app, product, or ser…

Your newest hire just sent their third Slack message in an hour. First, they couldn’t find the email template for password resets. Then they needed the escalation criteria for database issues. Now they’re asking which Jira project handles network tickets versus hardware requests. You answer each question in under a minute, but you’re also watching your own queue grow while they wait. This is day three. They completed the standard onboarding materials. They know the tools exist. They just can’t find anything when they need it. Closing a single ticket requires knowledge from systems that don’t talk to each other, and you’ve accidentally built an operation where experien…

This guide will show you how to integrate Salesforce objects and ServiceNow records. With a no-code setup and fully customizable two-way flow, Unito automatically syncs work items between Salesforce and ServiceNow so you can bridge the gap between sales teams, project managers, support teams, and more. Setting up an integration only takes minutes, and each Unito flow supports real-time updates, deep field mappings, and customizable rules. All you need is an account in Salesforce and ServiceNow with permission to create and edit records and objects. Unito’s two-way integration supports all ServiceNow records and Salesforce objects, but this walkthrough will focus on an…

You’re staring at an incident that looks familiar. The symptoms match something you saw three months ago: authentication failures cascading through the mobile app, then the web portal, then the partner integrations. You remember the pain of that incident clearly. What you can’t remember is whether you actually fixed the underlying problem or just patched the symptoms. You pull up the previous incident ticket. It shows the resolution: “Updated connection pool settings in the auth service.” But you’re looking at a Jira ticket, and the actual authentication service lives in a different team’s Azure DevOps backlog. The monitoring alerts came through PagerDuty. The custome…

How do you manage work between Jira and Smartsheet? At Unito, we often see examples of one department using one tool, while the team they work with prefers another, while neither is interested in doubling their work in multiple tools. This disrupts software development projects with lost information, siloed data, miscommunication, and sluggish collaboration. So if you’ve come here seeking help with enhanced project or task management, this Smartsheet Jira connector is your go-to solution. By the end of this article, you’ll learn how easily anyone can set up real-time task and issue syncing to boost your team’s efficiency. We’ll navigate through each Unito connector’s …

Your network operations team escalates a P1 ticket to infrastructure. The infrastructure team lead opens it twenty minutes later and sees a ticket created that morning with three comments, none of which explain why it’s now urgent or what the network team already tried. She pings the original engineer on Slack: “What’s the actual issue here?” He’s confused; he added a detailed handoff comment before escalating the ticket. The problem? It’s in the old system. She’s looking at the new one. This happens constantly during and after tool migrations. Escalation paths exist in your documentation and your org chart, but the actual context for individual tickets disappears in…

You meet all your Service Level Agreement metrics, but customer satisfaction scores are low and falling fast. You’re in monthly meetings explaining how both can be true while executives read comments about tickets “disappearing for days” despite being resolved “on time.” You suspect handoff delays are happening somewhere in the gaps between teams as tickets move between them. But your SLA tracking shows clean handoffs; the timer pauses, ownership transfers, and the clock restarts. Everything looks fine in your dashboard. The problem? Your metrics don’t actually measure your customers’ experience. They track ownership as though moving a ticket between systems is insta…

This guide will show you how to quickly create a 2-way sync between Azure DevOps and Jira that turns work items into issues. When this guide is complete, you’ll know how to easily set up a no-code integration that keeps your software development work up-to-date in real-time. Whether you’re a Jira developer wanting visibility into Azure DevOps or a lead software developer streamlining cross-team work, Unito has you covered! Here’s an example of our demo integration between Jira and Azure DevOps New to Unito? Here’s more information about this Jira Azure DevOps integration. By the end of this guide you’ll have an Azure DevOps Jira integration that can: …

So you’ve got a sales team in Salesforce with creatives or marketers managing projects in Asana. How do they collaborate and manage the pre-sales and sales cycles? Or alternatively, what if your support team handles case intake from Salesforce but then needs to assign work based on those cases through Asana? Maybe there’s a project manager jumping between both tools, maybe you’ve got automation figured out with a couple of triggers and actions to share work 1-way, or everyone is just sharing context in Slack and updating their own tasks accordingly. None of these options are ideal, especially not for a growing organization with hundreds or thousands of tasks to keep track…

Not every ticket gets resolved on the first try. Difficult issues, technical questions, and situations out of your control can all lead to a ticket needing to be escalated to a leader or a completely different team. That’s why having a robust, documented ticket escalation workflow is so important. Without this workflow, every ticket has the potential to balloon into a massive, costly issue. So how do you get this workflow under control? How do you measure its effectiveness? Here’s Unito’s guide to this essential workflow. What is ticket escalation? Ticket escalation is a process through which tickets that need additional expertise or authority are routed to…

The ticket was simple. A user can’t access their financial reporting system. Priority: High. That part was clear. What wasn’t clear? Three teams touched the same ticket. Security had already verified credentials. Network ops had confirmed connectivity. But when the ticket landed with your application support team, none of that history came with it. Just a ticket number, a frustrated user, and a request to “please resolve ASAP.” You spent the next forty minutes reconstructing work that had already been done. The user spent that time wondering why IT couldn’t get its act together. And somewhere, buried in two other ticketing systems, was all the context you needed. …

If you’re a Smartsheet user, you know just how useful having the right bit of data from a different tool can be. While Smartsheet is a great way to oversee even the most complex projects, it’s not quite as specialized as tools like GitHub, ServiceNow, or Jira for some teams. Bridging the gap between these tools is essential for better collaboration, and that’s where data integration comes in. Smartsheet’s built-in Data Shuttle is one option. Unito is another. Which one’s best for what you need? Smartsheet Data ShuttleUnitoIntegration typeScheduled file imports and exportsTwo-way live data syncSetup complexityManual file handling and simple mappingNo-code, user-fri…

Your support AI routes a high-value customer to the basic tier queue. Not because the AI is poorly trained, but because it can’t see the CRM data showing their account status. The customer waits 20 minutes for an agent who immediately needs to escalate. You check the ticket later and see what went wrong: the AI made its routing decision using only what existed in the support platform. Everything else such as the account value, the renewal date, and the previous escalations live in systems the AI couldn’t access. ChatGPT works brilliantly because you give it complete context within the conversation. You describe the problem, provide background, and clarify details in r…

You update your ServiceNow ticket with engineering notes. Then open Jira to update the corresponding ticket with the same notes. Then Slack the engineer: “Did you see the update?” Then check both systems to confirm they match. Fifteen minutes gone. Forty escalations this week mean ten hours of duplicate work. Nobody’s tracking this (no time code for “checking if systems are in sync” exists) but you’re paying for it. In time. In delays when systems drift. In errors when updates don’t match. Management sees “tickets resolved.” Doesn’t see the invisible labor creating that output. Why escalation work stays invisible to management Your time tracking shows a ticket …

You close the ServiceNow ticket at 4:17 PM, finally. Customer issue resolved after three hours of back-and-forth, all fields updated, status set to Closed. You switch tabs to check engineering’s progress on the underlying bug in Jira. The ticket is still marked “Waiting for Support.” The last comment is from yesterday: “Need more info from customer.” You closed that loop three hours ago. Your engineering team never saw the update. Now you’re typing an explanation to the customer about why the fix took two days longer than it should have. Your support team averages four-hour resolution times. Your engineering team averages a six-hour turnaround on escalations. But …

You’re at your desk reviewing last week’s ticket metrics, coffee cooling beside your monitor, and one number looks good: 4.5 hours average time to escalation. That means your L1 team tried everything before passing tickets up, right? Then you drill into a resolved incident. Engineering fixed it in 10 minutes. API timeout error (something they’d seen three times that day already). Your L1 agent spent 4 hours troubleshooting (restarted services, checked configurations, walked the user through cache clearing). Standard fixes for connectivity problems. Engineering recognized the pattern immediately and applied a known workaround. Where did those 4 hours create value? …

Jira is a powerhouse for software development, but it’s rarely a central tool for other teams. Stakeholders typically spend more time looking at spreadsheets or slide decks than they do Jira issues. Team leads spend just as much time in Jira as in the tools everyone else uses. Developers spend almost no time in Jira, focusing their work on coding tools and repositories like GitHub. Now imagine getting all these people to collaborate on a software development project. That’s where Jira integrations come in. They standardize data from Jira in other tools, as well as feed your Jira issues with additional context from these other platforms. Here’s why you need a J…

NetSuite is a leader in enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, used by many organizations to centralize data from CRMs, business intelligence tools, and more. But whether it’s because of the price tag, available integrations, or a lack of focus on a specific industry, many organizations look to one of NetSuite’s many competitors. Here’s a list of the best options out there. NetSuite Competitors: Summary table Netsuite competitorPrice rangeIdeal organization sizeBest forMain limitationQuickBooks Online$38-$275 a month50 or lessSmall and medium business accounting needsMore limited than other NetSuite alternativesXero$13-$78 a month50 or lessSmall and medi…