Model your ticket pipeline around how work actually flows, not around statuses you copied from somewhere
Model your ticket pipeline around how work actually flows, not around statuses you copied from somewhere
The first real configuration decision is your ticket pipeline, and most people get it backwards. They paste in a generic set of statuses ("New, In progress, Waiting, Closed") because the tool ships with them, and then every team forces its real workflow into stages that do not describe what is happening. Within a month nobody trusts the pipeline because a ticket sitting in "In progress" could mean five different things.
Configure the pipeline around the real stages a piece of work passes through for your business. A stage is a meaningful, distinct state where the ticket is waiting on a specific party to do a specific thing. "Waiting on customer" and "Waiting on engineering" are different states with different owners and different escalation rules, so they are different stages, not one vague "Waiting".
Run a separate pipeline when the work is genuinely a different process, and only then. Support tickets, onboarding tasks, and bug escalations often have different stages, different owners, and different SLAs, so they deserve their own pipelines rather than being crammed into one. The trap is the opposite extreme: a dozen pipelines that fragment your reporting and force agents to guess where a ticket belongs. Start with one clean pipeline, split only when a workflow is provably distinct.
Keep the stage names boring and unambiguous, and make sure each stage answers "who is this waiting on and what unblocks it". If two people read a stage name and picture different situations, the stage is wrong. The test is to open your pipeline and tell, from the stage alone, what needs to happen next on every ticket in it.
INTERVIEW EWOUD: Give a before-and-after of a ticket pipeline you redesigned. How many stages did it start with, what did it become, and what did the cleaner pipeline let the team see that they could not before?