Set up the desk - Thread Docs

Everything downstream — routing, XLAs, analytics, coaching — keys off how your desk is structured. Get the shape right first and the rest of your job gets easier. This lesson sets up three things in order: your service team model, your Inbox teams and pods, and the Views each technician opens to.

Decide your service team model

Before you create anything in Thread, decide how the desk is organized. Most MSPs land on one of a few shapes:

Tiered — Tier 1 triage and quick fixes, Tier 2/3 for escalations and projects. Clean for coverage and career paths.
Pod-based — small cross-tier squads, each owning a set of clients end-to-end. Strong on client relationships and context.
Blended — a triage pod up front feeding specialist teams behind it. Common once a desk grows past a handful of techs.

There’s no single right answer — but decide it deliberately, because your Thread teams, dispatch, and Views should all mirror it. The service team structure guide walks through the trade-offs and how each model maps onto Thread.

Structure Thread to match how you actually run the desk, not an org chart you aspire to. You can restructure later, but every technician builds muscle memory around the shape you ship — so ship the real one.

Build your Inbox teams and pods

Once you know the model, build it in Thread. Inbox teams are the groups you route work to and report on — a team can be a tier, a pod, an after-hours crew, or a specialist squad. Members can belong to more than one team, so a Tier 2 engineer who also covers a key client can sit in both. Teams do three jobs for you at once:

Teams give you…	Why it matters as a manager
A routing target	Auto-dispatch and Flows can send work to a team, not just a person — so coverage survives PTO and turnover.
A reporting boundary	Magic Analytics and View insights roll up by team, so you can compare pods and spot the overloaded one.
A permissions and visibility scope	Teams shape what each group sees and can act on, keeping techs focused on their own board.

Set up the teams that mirror your model, assign members, and name them the way your desk talks — “Tier 1”, “Healthcare Pod”, “After Hours” — so routing rules and reports read plainly later.

Newly synced members from your PSA aren’t automatically added to teams or Views. Adding a new hire is a two-step habit: put them on the right team, then add them to the Views that team works from.

Set up the Views your techs live in

A View is a saved, filtered slice of the queue — the lens each technician opens Inbox to. This is the single biggest quality-of-life lever you control: a good View is a focused, prioritized worklist; a bad one is an undifferentiated firehose that buries urgent work. Build Views around how each team works, not around every field in the PSA. A few that most desks want:

My open work — assigned to me, not closed, sorted by priority or XLA risk.
Team unassigned — the pod’s incoming work waiting for a first touch. This is your dispatch surface.
Breaching soon — anything with an XLA timer about to trip, across the team.
Waiting on client — parked tickets, so nothing goes silent for days unnoticed.

Every View carries insights — live counts and trends for that slice — so a View isn’t only a worklist, it’s a readout. Keep an eye on the unassigned and breaching-soon Views throughout the day; they’re your earliest warning that the desk is falling behind.

Don’t over-build Views. Five sharp Views a technician actually uses beat twenty they ignore. Start each team with the handful above, then add a View only when someone hits a real, repeated filtering need.

Wire technicians in

With teams and Views in place, onboarding a technician is quick and repeatable:

Confirm the PSA sync

Make sure the member exists in Thread. New members arrive from your PSA sync — if someone’s missing, run a sync before you try to place them.

Add them to their team(s)

Place them on the Inbox team that matches their tier or pod. This is what makes team routing and reporting include them.

Add them to the right Views

Add them to the Views their team works from — Views don’t inherit automatically. Without this step, a new tech opens Inbox to nothing.

Spot-check their first day

Have them open Inbox and confirm they land on a focused View of their own work, not the whole desk. If it’s a firehose, the View or team assignment needs a tweak.

Your desk has structure. Now put the clock and the routing on top of it — so the right work reaches the right pod, on time.

XLAs & dispatch

Response timers, auto-dispatch profiles, available-for-dispatch, and business hours.

​Decide your service team model

​Build your Inbox teams and pods

​Set up the Views your techs live in

​Wire technicians in

​Next

XLAs & dispatch

Decide your service team model

Build your Inbox teams and pods

Set up the Views your techs live in

Wire technicians in

Next