Zvonimir Durcevic Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Zvonimir Durcevic: How Feedback Transforms Product Owners

The Great Product Owner: Embracing Feedback and Adapting Over Time

Zvonimir shares his experience with a Product Owner who demonstrated exceptional growth over a two-year period. What made this PO stand out was their willingness to receive feedback from the team and adjust their behavior accordingly. When the team expressed difficulty accessing the PO for questions and early feedback, the PO responded by rearranging their schedule to sit near the team part-time. Zvone emphasizes how these incremental changes, driven by openness to feedback, transformed this person into an exemplary Product Owner. The key insight: great Product Owners honor past practices while embracing necessary changes for the future.

Self-reflection Question: How might your willingness (or reluctance) to accept feedback be affecting your development as a Product Owner?

The Bad Product Owner: The Reluctant Subject Matter Expert

In this segment, Zvonimir describes working with a Subject Matter Expert who was assigned the Product Owner role despite not wanting the responsibility. While this person excelled at documenting requirements from their extensive knowledge, they resisted taking on core PO duties. The organization assigned them the role but didn’t push for proper adoption of responsibilities. Consequently, the team and Scrum Master were forced to assume PO duties to fill the gap. Although this arrangement functioned temporarily thanks to the team’s capabilities and the SME’s knowledge, it created an unsustainable situation where role accountability was unclear.

🚀 Global Agile Summit 2025

Join us in Tallinn, Estonia, from May 18th – 20th, 2025, for an event that will inspire, challenge, and equip you with real-world Agile success stories.

🌍 Connect with global Agile leaders.
💡 Learn practical strategies for impact.
🔥 Break free from Agile fatigue and become a Pragmatic Innovator.

Check Full Program

About Zvonimir Durcevic

Zvonimir has worked in agile product development since 2005, holding roles such as Scrum Master, Agile Coach, IT Project, and R&D Manager. He works with teams to co-create tailored solutions to increase engagement and improve customer focus and effectiveness, enabling accelerated value delivery and rapid adaptation to change.

You can link with Zvonimir Durcevic on LinkedIn.

Zvonimir Durcevic: The Solution-Focused Retrospective for Agile Teams, Turning Problems Into Goals

Zvonimir defines Scrum Master success as being explicit and intentional about defining and achieving goals. He references Richard Hackmann’s model of team effectiveness as a framework to evaluate whether he’s helping teams become truly effective. For Zvone, success comes from creating structures that provide teams with feedback about their performance and being explicit about the team’s purpose through practices like chartering. By focusing on these elements, Scrum Masters can help teams build the foundation for sustainable success.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Problems Are Disguised Goals

This solution-focused retrospective format, inspired by the work of Ralph Miata and Veronika Jungwirth, allows teams to briefly acknowledge problems before pivoting quickly to what they want to achieve instead. Zvonimir explains that while teams need space to express challenges, the format redirects energy toward envisioning a better future through solution-focused questions. The process includes validating problems, using scale questions (0-10) to assess current status, reviewing past attempts at reaching goals, and designing small experiments to move toward desired outcomes. This approach helps teams shift from problem-orientation to goal-orientation.

Self-reflection Question: How might reframing your team’s persistent problems as goals change your approach to addressing them?

🚀 Global Agile Summit 2025

Join us in Tallinn, Estonia, from May 18th – 20th, 2025, for an event that will inspire, challenge, and equip you with real-world Agile success stories.

🌍 Connect with global Agile leaders.
💡 Learn practical strategies for impact.
🔥 Break free from Agile fatigue and become a Pragmatic Innovator.

Check Full Program

About Zvonimir Durcevic

You can link with Zvonimir Durcevic on LinkedIn.

Zvonimir Durcevic: From Command to Collaboration, An Agile Leadership Team’s Transformation Story

In this episode, Zvonimir discusses his experience supporting a leadership team transitioning from a traditional command-and-control management style to a more collaborative approach involving people in change decisions. Drawing from EDGE Theory of Change (based on Arnold Mendel’s work) and Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) training, Zvone helped the leadership team understand what awaited them on the “other side” of this transformation. Through multiple half-day coaching sessions, he guided them in defining their new leadership identity and developing self-reflection skills. A critical element of this work was creating a conflict protocol that allowed leaders to discuss different perspectives constructively. Zvone emphasizes the importance of helping teams create a “third identity” – a new collective self that emerges through transformation.

Self-reflection Question: What elements of your current leadership identity would you need to let go of to embrace a more collaborative approach to change?

🚀 Global Agile Summit 2025

Join us in Tallinn, Estonia, from May 18th – 20th, 2025, for an event that will inspire, challenge, and equip you with real-world Agile success stories.

🌍 Connect with global Agile leaders.
💡 Learn practical strategies for impact.
🔥 Break free from Agile fatigue and become a Pragmatic Innovator.

Check Full Program

About Zvonimir Durcevic

You can link with Zvonimir Durcevic on LinkedIn.

Zvonimir Durcevic: Context Diagramming, Helping Agile Teams See Their Complex Communication Network

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Zvonimir shares a story about a five-person team developing an important product who maintained good internal dynamics but limited their interaction with the rest of the organization. Despite delivering quality work, they were viewed as a “difficult team” by stakeholders. When Zvone joined, he conducted assessments and introduced context diagramming to map the team’s relationships and dependencies. This exercise revealed the complexity of their communication network and helped the team understand that cutting off relationships with stakeholders was counterproductive. The breakthrough came when the team began using the context diagram to explain their situation to others, helping stakeholders recognize how organizational factors were affecting the team’s work.

Self-reflection Question: How might mapping your team’s communication network reveal disconnects that are affecting your effectiveness?

Featured Book of the Week: Agile Transformation by Michael Spayd

Zvonimir recommends “Agile Transformation” by Michael Spayd as a resource that helped him understand how to examine systems through different lenses. The book provides multiple perspectives for gaining deeper insights into the systems we work with. Zvone particularly values the book’s ability to help practitioners look beyond surface-level issues and understand underlying dynamics in organizations undergoing Agile transformations.

In this section we talk about the Integral agile transformation framework.

🚀 Global Agile Summit 2025

Join us in Tallinn, Estonia, from May 18th – 20th, 2025, for an event that will inspire, challenge, and equip you with real-world Agile success stories.

🌍 Connect with global Agile leaders.
💡 Learn practical strategies for impact.
🔥 Break free from Agile fatigue and become a Pragmatic Innovator.

Check Full Program

About Zvonimir Durcevic

You can link with Zvonimir Durcevic on LinkedIn.

Zvonimir Durcevic: Establishing Communication Channels, Lessons From a Scrum Master’s Failure

In this episode, Zvonimir shares a pivotal experience that shaped his approach as a Scrum Master. His team started strong with excellent stakeholder relationships, but gradually team members began missing refinement meetings as they took on more outside responsibilities. Despite conversations with management, the issue persisted, leading to a growing backlog that no one wanted to trim down. Zvone learned critical lessons about the importance of establishing clear working agreements with stakeholders and sponsors from the beginning. He emphasizes the need to create proper communication channels, as successful Agile work depends on reaching the right people when problems arise.

Self-reflection Question: How might the communication agreements in your organization be contributing to your team’s ability to focus on their work?

🚀 Global Agile Summit 2025

Join us in Tallinn, Estonia, from May 18th – 20th, 2025, for an event that will inspire, challenge, and equip you with real-world Agile success stories.

🌍 Connect with global Agile leaders.
💡 Learn practical strategies for impact.
🔥 Break free from Agile fatigue and become a Pragmatic Innovator.

Check Full Program

About Zvonimir Durcevic

You can link with Zvonimir Durcevic on LinkedIn.