By considering the general properties of approximate units in differentiable algebras, we are able to present a unified approach to characterising completeness of spectral metric spaces, existence of connections on modules, and the lifting of Kasparov products to the unbounded category. In particular, by strengthening Kasparovs technical theorem, we show that given any two composable KK-classes, we can find unbounded representatives whose product can be constructed to yield an unbounded representative of the Kasparov product.