Hiring and Onboarding Remote Employees

How familiar with Jira does a product manager actually need to be? The engineering team lives there. Sprint work happens there. Context lives there. But Jira was built for engineers. The interface assumes you care about workflow states, story points, and sprint velocity rather than customer problems and strategic priorities. PMs only need to know enough to communicate effectively with engineering, maintain visibility into progress, and avoid becoming a bottleneck. They don’t need to know enough to become a Jira admin. Not enough to configure workflows. Enough to participate without getting lost. This guide covers what product managers actually need to know abo…

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. …

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…

You’ve documented your ticket escalation process. Level One handles password resets and basic requests. Level Two takes infrastructure issues and account access problems. Level Three owns complex technical problems and vendor coordination. The workflow diagram looks clean. The support tiers are clearly defined. Then a ticket escalates, and everything breaks down. Level Two gets a ticket with “Network connectivity issue, escalating” in the notes and nothing else. They can’t see the troubleshooting steps Level One already tried. They don’t know which user reported the problem or when it started. They spend twenty minutes reconstructing context from Slack messages and em…

Your service desk metrics look great. Average handle time is down. First response time is under ten minutes. Ticket volume is steady. Then the VP of Sales corners you after standup: “Why does it take three days to reset someone’s laptop permissions? My team is still waiting on that CRM integration issue from last week.” You pull up the tickets. Both were closed by your service desk within the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Both were handed off to specialist teams (security, integration support), and that’s where they vanished into the void. Your service desk did its job perfectly. The work still didn’t get done. This is the coordination problem that most IT direct…

Data makes for better decisions, more effective projects, and stronger alignment across your organization. With Smartsheet as the powerhouse for that data, you get visibility on valuable work, seamless collaboration, and deep reporting. But the data you need isn’t always in Smartsheet. That’s when you need a software integration. Smartsheet offers its own integrations through Smartsheet Bridge, allowing you to bridge the gap between this essential tool and other platforms. Unito’s Smartsheet integration, meanwhile, creates a two-way flow between Smartsheet and other tools, powering smoother collaboration across tools. Here’s your guide to picking the right option …

You’re three minutes into a Severity 1 incident when you realize nobody knows why the previous responder decided to restart the database cluster. The logs are scrolling, alerts are firing, and the executive team has joined the war room. Someone asks, “Did we check replication lag before the restart?” Nobody knows. The person who made that call is already troubleshooting the next failure mode, unreachable in another Slack thread. You’re holding a lit fuse with no idea how long it’s been burning. This happens because blameless culture meets its infrastructure problem during handoffs. You’ve done the postmortem training. You’ve removed “human error” from your vocabul…

Four teams. Three systems. One ticket nobody wanted to own. A customer can’t access their dashboard. Your support agent troubleshoots for twenty minutes, confirms it’s not a password issue, and escalates the ticket to engineering. Engineering sends it back: “This is a support issue.” Your agent re-escalates with more context. Engineering kicks it to DevOps. DevOps routes it to the platform team. The platform team sends it back to your queue: “Severity 3, not ours.” By the time someone actually looked at the problem, two business days had passed and your customer filed three follow-up tickets. Nobody bounced the ticket out of spite. Everyone applied their proce…

When teams track MTTR (mean time to resolution), they typically focus on technical response speed: how quickly engineers diagnose and deploy fixes. But look at actual incident timelines and you’ll find a different pattern. Delays happen while information travels between teams. Support has customer impact data trapped in tickets. Engineering has resolution context stuck in dev tools. Operations has monitoring insights isolated in observability platforms. The repair work waits on someone manually bridging these gaps. This isn’t about slow people or poor communication skills. It’s structural. Your systems don’t talk to each other, so humans become the connective tissue b…