The Scrum Guide defines three accountabilities with precision (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developers) and says comparatively little about the broader circle of stakeholders who affect and are affected by the team's work. This isn't an oversight; stakeholder configurations vary too much by context for the framework to standardize. But it means teams have to do this mapping themselves, and skipping it is a common, quiet source of dysfunction.
Internal stakeholders beyond the core team
Executive sponsors care primarily about strategic alignment and return on investment, and typically engage at a level of detail far above individual sprint outcomes: they need to trust that the team's direction serves the broader goal, not to review individual backlog items. Communicating with this group at the wrong level of detail (too granular) is a common mismatch that wastes both parties' time.
Other teams with dependencies (upstream teams the current team relies on, downstream teams relying on the current team's output) have a direct stake in the team's timing and technical decisions, even though they're not part of daily Scrum events. Teams that don't explicitly map these dependencies often discover them reactively, when a dependency breaks, rather than proactively managing them.
Functional managers, in organizations where they exist alongside self-organizing teams, retain interests in individual career development, resourcing, and skill development that aren't fully captured by the team's sprint-level goals. Ignoring this stakeholder group entirely tends to create friction between the team's autonomy and the broader organizational structures it still operates within.
External stakeholders
End users are the ultimate judges of whether the product delivers real value, and yet are often the stakeholder group with the least direct, structured input into the process: most user input arrives filtered through the Product Owner rather than heard directly. Teams that create some direct channel to actual users, even occasionally, tend to catch misunderstandings that filtered secondhand feedback misses.
Customers (distinct from end users in B2B contexts, where the buyer and the user are often different people) have interests around contractual commitments, support expectations, and business relationships that don't always align neatly with what individual end users want.
Regulatory bodies, in regulated industries, impose constraints that don't show up naturally in a backlog generated purely from user and business input, and need someone specifically responsible for surfacing them before they become compliance problems discovered too late.
Why mapping stakeholders explicitly is worth the effort
Teams that never build the explicit map tend to discover stakeholders reactively: when someone who should have been consulted objects loudly to a decision they weren't part of, or when a dependency that was never surfaced causes a late-breaking delay. An explicit stakeholder map, revisited periodically as the team's context changes, replaces this pattern of reactive discovery with proactive management, and it costs a fraction of the time that recovering from a missed stakeholder relationship typically does.