Meridian Industries: 120 Projects and Nothing Moves

The Boardroom

The conference room on the sixth floor of Meridian Industries had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Stuttgart skyline. On a clear day, you could see the Fernsehturm. On this particular Thursday in March, nobody was looking at the view.

Heinrich Schafer sat at the head of the table. He had founded Meridian Industries 35 years ago with his wife Margarete, building it from a two-person welding workshop into a 1,200-employee manufacturing company. He had retired to the supervisory board three years ago, but the company was still his. He still held the majority of shares. He still asked the sharpest questions.

Today, the question was simple: “Why are we not growing?”

The previous CEO had left six months earlier, exhausted by a problem he had created himself. In an attempt to drive cross-functional innovation, he had introduced project management across every department. The result was 120 active projects, each with its own sponsor, its own budget, and its own claim to being “high priority.” Product management demanded new features for sales growth. Production and operations demanded reliability. The project managers mediated, escalated, and eventually became another layer of conflicting goals.

The value-creation experts, the engineers and designers who actually built things, were overwhelmed. Each one juggled four to five projects simultaneously. Context switching consumed their days. Quality declined. Deadlines slipped. The best people started leaving. Those who stayed burned out quietly.

Meridian Industries was stuck. And Heinrich Schafer wanted to know why.

The New CEO

Dr. Katharina Meier was not the obvious choice. She came from industrial automation, not traditional manufacturing. She had an engineering PhD, not an MBA. She was 44, younger than most of the supervisory board members. And she was impatient with bureaucracy in a company that ran on bureaucracy.

But she was decisive. The supervisory board had watched three years of stagnation under the previous CEO. They wanted someone who would act. Katharina had turned around a mid-sized automation company in Munich in 18 months. She had a reputation for cutting through complexity.

Her first week at Meridian, Katharina walked the production floor. She talked to welders, designers, production planners, and maintenance technicians. She asked one question everywhere she went: “What prevents you from doing your best work?”

The answers were consistent. Too many projects. Unclear priorities. Decisions that took months because every change required approval from people who did not understand the work. A career system that rewarded specialization and hierarchy, not collaboration and results.

Katharina summarized her diagnosis to the management board in her second week: “We have 1,200 people working hard on 120 things that do not matter. We need fewer things, clearer ownership, and the courage to say no.”

The CFO, Dr. Florian Brandt, nodded carefully. The CTO, Thomas Wendt, crossed his arms.

The Map That Changed Everything

Marcus Hartmann arrived as an external consultant, recommended by a colleague who had worked with him on a similar transformation. He was patient, methodical, and had a habit of asking questions that made powerful people uncomfortable.

Katharina asked him to facilitate a strategic refinement process. Marcus suggested they start with Wardley Mapping, a method for visualizing products and services along their evolutionary path from novel invention to commodity.

The first mapping session took place in the boardroom with the supervisory board, the management board, and ten experienced managers and team experts. Marcus covered the walls with large sheets of paper and handed out sticky notes.

The exercise revealed two strategic products. The laser welding tool family, branded ProWeld, was Meridian’s global flagship. Mature, profitable, with well-established supply chains. The second was MetalForge One, a novel 3D printing machine tool with AI-based control software. The board had treated MetalForge as a research project. The Wardley Map showed it was already approaching Custom Built. The window for competitive advantage was closing.

But the map also showed something nobody wanted to see.

Meridian Documentation Services, the 80-person division that produced technical manuals, training programs, and certification courses, sat in a zone that was moving toward Commodity. AI-powered tools were beginning to let customers generate their own documentation directly from product data. Training enrollment was declining. Revenue, while still positive, had peaked.

Heinrich Schafer looked at the map and shook his head. “Our customers need human trainers. Machines cannot teach the subtleties of a ProWeld X7.”

Thomas Wendt, the CTO, disagreed. He had data. Three major customers had already cancelled training contracts and replaced them with AI-generated onboarding in a matter of weeks. “Heinrich, I respect your experience. But the data says otherwise.”

The room went quiet. Nobody contradicted a founder lightly at Meridian Industries.

Katharina broke the silence. “We do not need to agree today. I am putting this on the Enterprise Backlog as a strategic Goal: assess the impact and formulate a response within two Tournaments.”

The Purge

Building the Enterprise Backlog was the most politically charged decision of Katharina’s tenure. She replaced the portfolio of 120 active projects with a single, ordered list of strategic Goals. Marcus introduced Kanban to manage the flow.

The mechanics were simple. The politics were brutal.

Eighty project sponsors learned that their initiative was no longer a priority. Some accepted it quietly. Others did not.

Frank Eisner, VP Engineering, confronted Katharina in the hallway after the announcement. His flagship digitalization project, which he had spent two years championing, was not in the top ten. “You are throwing away two years of work,” he said.

Katharina did not flinch. “I am not throwing it away. I am being honest that we cannot do everything at once. Your project is on the backlog. It will get its turn when the priorities above it are addressed.”

“And when will that be?”

“When the evidence says it should be next.”

Frank Eisner resigned three months later. He was not the only departure. But the departures clarified something: the people who stayed were the people who wanted to build, not the people who wanted to protect their territory.

The First Arena

The laser welding division was selected as the first Arena. It could operate relatively independently. Its supplier dependencies were already managed internally. Development already used Scrum. Production had experimented with Lean. It was the safest bet for proving that the new structure worked.

Klaus Brenner, the head of production, became the Arena Owner. He was not a C-Level executive. He was the person closest to the product and the teams. He knew every machine on the shop floor by name. When he spoke, the welders listened.

Thomas Wendt, the CTO, had expected the Arena Owner role for himself. He had the seniority, the technical knowledge, and the organizational authority. Marcus argued against it. “The Arena Owner must be where the work happens, not in the boardroom. Klaus lives on the production floor. That is where the decisions need to be made.”

Thomas was furious. Then he became an Accountable Representative, contributing strategic oversight from the Tournament. Six months later, he admitted to Katharina that Marcus had been right. “I would have tried to control everything from my office. Klaus trusts his teams. That is what the Arena needed.”

The existing ScrumMasters and people leads reorganized. Some transitioned into System Lead functions. Others filled gaps as highly needed experts within the teams. Merging the backlogs was the most significant shift: multiple team backlogs became a single, Arena Owner-ordered backlog. Priorities that had been negotiated in hallway conversations were suddenly transparent. Some managers lost influence. Others gained clarity.

Meanwhile, Nina Vogler, a former product manager with an entrepreneurial streak, built the second Arena around MetalForge One. She hired Jan Seidel, an experienced ScrumMaster, as her System Lead. New teams formed from volunteers across the company and fresh external hires. Old rules ceased to exist from one day to another. Inside the enterprise, a startup was born.

The AI Disruption

Eighteen months after the first Arenas launched, the Wardley Map prediction arrived. Faster than anyone had expected.

Meridian Documentation Services lost 40% of its revenue in 18 months. Customers adopted AI-powered documentation tools. Training enrollment dropped as companies built internal AI-assisted onboarding. The division’s 80 employees faced an uncertain future.

Katharina had hoped it would happen slowly. It did not.

She responded in one Tournament with three moves.

First, she formed three small experiment teams. A predictive maintenance advisor that would analyze machine sensor data and recommend maintenance before failures occurred. An intelligent spare parts engine that would predict needs based on usage patterns. An AI quality inspection system for the laser welding line. Each team had 3-5 people, a clear hypothesis, and a three-month runway to prove customer value.

Second, she moved people. Domain experts from the documentation division brought irreplaceable product knowledge to the experiment teams and existing Arenas. The MetalForge Arena absorbed four people who understood how customers learn. Their knowledge of training workflows turned out to be more valuable than any technical specification: they knew where customers struggled, which meant they knew where the product needed to improve. Others moved into the laser welding Arena where their documentation expertise helped teams improve usability.

Third, the hard truth.

After absorbing employees into Arenas and experiment teams, approximately 15 positions could not be filled. Katharina addressed the affected employees personally, together with Marcus and the works council.

Sabine Keller had been with Meridian for 22 years. She had written the first ProWeld training manual. She had trained thousands of customers. She sat in the front row.

“Did you know this would happen when you showed us the Wardley Map?” she asked.

Katharina paused. “I hoped it would not happen this fast.”

The room was silent. Then Katharina continued. She explained the strategic situation honestly. The market had changed. AI had made part of their work obsolete. The company could not sustain roles without customer demand. Severance packages were offered. Marcus organized job placement support and retraining opportunities. Some employees found roles at customer companies where their Meridian product knowledge was valued.

The transition took three months. It was painful. The entire organization watched how leadership handled it. The transparency and dignity of the process became a defining moment for Meridian’s culture. Employees saw that the system did not pretend disruption away. It faced it, communicated it, and acted on it.

The Improvement

Roughly 850 employees still worked in the traditional structure. Production planning, procurement, quality assurance, field service, corporate functions. They had watched the Arena launches and the AI disruption unfold. Some with hope, some with fear.

Katharina addressed all 1,200 employees. She presented the enterprise strategy, the Arenas, the Goals from the Enterprise Backlog, and the AI disruption honestly. Her message was clear: not everyone would be in an Arena soon, but everyone’s work mattered. AI was changing their industry, and they would face it together.

Marcus introduced retrospectives for the parts of the organization not yet in Arenas, running them on the same monthly rhythm as the Matches. The first sessions were awkward. People were not used to being asked what they would change. But after three months, the conversations became honest. Problems that had been silently tolerated for years surfaced for the first time.

Each month, every group picked one thing to improve. Not five things. One. A maintenance group reduced the approval chain for spare part orders from five signatures to two. The procurement team introduced a shared status board.

Then something unexpected happened. Ralf Neuhaus, a field service technician with no background in AI, demonstrated a tool in a retrospective. He had been testing an AI agent on his own time that auto-classified incoming service requests. The agent analyzed the text of the request, matched it against known failure patterns, and routed it to the right specialist. What had taken a human dispatcher 15 minutes per request took the AI agent seconds. Triage time dropped by 60%.

Nobody had told Ralf to use AI. The idea came from a retrospective where his group identified triage bottlenecks as their biggest problem. He found the tool, tested it, and brought it to the team. Bottom-up innovation, emerging from the structure that Marcus had put in place.

Marcus introduced value stream mapping to the industrial services division. They mapped the flow from customer service request to completed field repair. A 12-week lead time. Only three weeks of actual work. Nine weeks of waiting: for approvals, for parts, for scheduling, for handoffs between departments. The AI tools made something else visible: several waiting steps existed solely because humans had to read, classify, and route information. The AI could do it in seconds.

Teams formed around value streams. Kanban systems made work visible. After 18 months of gradual improvement, the industrial services division had transformed. Three cross-functional teams had formed around the field service, spare parts, and maintenance value streams. Service request lead time dropped from 12 weeks to 4.

The division graduated to Arena status. A former operations manager became the Arena Owner. The teams already existed. The practices were in place. The Arena formalized what had grown organically.

Full Circle

The predictive maintenance experiment team proved its value within the first three months. Two pilot customers reduced unplanned downtime by 35%. After a year, the team had grown to 12 people and served eight customers. The Tournament assessed: this was a distinct product with its own market and its own future. It became Arena 4.

Carla Reinhardt became the Arena Owner. She had joined the predictive maintenance team from the documentation division. A former field service engineer who had transitioned into the documentation division years ago, where she wrote maintenance manuals and trained customers on how to diagnose equipment problems. When the documentation division collapsed, she had volunteered for the experiment team. Her knowledge of customer pain was not theoretical. She had sat in factory control rooms and watched operators struggle with equipment failures she could have predicted.

From a dying business to leading a new one. That was Carla’s arc. And it was Meridian’s arc.

At the next quarterly Tournament, Heinrich Schafer sat in his usual seat at the head of the table. He was 72 now. He rarely spoke in these meetings. He listened.

Carla’s team demonstrated the predictive maintenance AI to the full supervisory board. A real customer case: a ProWeld X7 laser welding system that had flagged an anomaly in its cooling cycle three days before the scheduled maintenance window. The AI recommended an immediate inspection. The customer found a failing pump that would have caused a production stop costing 200,000 euros. The repair took two hours.

Heinrich turned to Katharina. “I was wrong about the documentation division. But I am glad you were not.”

Katharina smiled. “I was not right either. I hoped it would not happen this fast. But the system we built, the Tournament, the Backlog, the experiment teams, it allowed us to respond before it was too late.”

Five Arenas. Strategy visible on a wall, not buried in slide decks. People engaged in work they owned, not juggling projects they could not finish. AI woven into the daily work, not as a top-down mandate, but as tools that people chose because they solved real problems.

Meridian Industries was not done evolving. It never would be.

That was the point.