What is part of the Customer Relations team in Scrum@Scale

Question

The Scrum@Scale guide documents a Customer Relations team as a separate entity, but does not specify what it entails.

Customer Relations, Legal / Compliance, and People Operations are included here since they are necessary parts of organizations and will exist as independent Scrum teams on their own, which all of the others may rely upon.

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• What are the common roles/responsibilities of a CR team in Scrum@Scale? e.g. would CR also contain a sales like activity?
• Why is this team not near the pentagon they relate to? As an independent Support/Implementation/Sales/Customer team, with a PO which feeds its local MetaScrum.

I guess my question really is why is it specially named and not part of the normal scaling organisation? It makes me feel you can handle it with a small team 3-9 people and does not need to scale ever.

Answer 1

Customer relations typically includes everything needed to maintain relationships with existing customers and reach new customers. It tends to be focused on communication - answering questions, resolving issues or complaints, and similar types of work. It may includes sales and marketing, as well as social media and others. The exact definition varies by organization, but the Scrum @ Scale guide is showing how common functions integrate with the product development Scrum Teams at the Executive Meta Scrum / EAT level.

In Scrum @ Scale, Customer Relations (along with Legal / Compliance and HR / People Ops) are their own Scrum Teams. If you are scaling your product development teams with Scrum @ Scale, then you will likely also scale these other teams with Scrum @ Scale. All of the different team types (Product Development, Customer Relations, Legal / Compliance, and HR / People Ops) all converge at the Executive Meta Scrum and EAT levels.

Within these teams, you would continue to have a Scrum Master, a Product Owner (who wouldn't be managing a Product, but the Services provided by these organizations - perhaps it should be called a Service Owner), and a Development Team that carries out the work. If necessary, they would have Scrum of Scrums and Meta Scrum and Scrum of Scrum of Scrums and so on. However, all aspects of the organization come together at the Executive Meta Scrum and EAT.