Henrik Van Weyden is Head of Development at Luga Spezialmaschinenbau AG. The new CEO is calling for a drastic reduction in the R&D quota and development time. Development is already under pressure anyway. How is he supposed to manage this? He doesn't have the faintest idea until a brief encounter with Wolf Reichenbach. He obviously knows a lot about product development and gives him an initially puzzling tip: Luga must become a maturity level 3 company. Maturity level 3 - what does that mean? Who is this man? Is he the key to solving the problem? Van Weyden's gut feeling says: Yes ...

This business novel addresses the typical challenges of product development faced by medium-sized industrial companies in global competition - whether they are mechanical engineering, automotive or electronics companies. Efficiency in product creation requires all departments to work closely together from the outset on an interdisciplinary basis. To achieve this, functionally structured companies must transform themselves into process-oriented matrix organisations. Platform and module strategies must be implemented; new processes for portfolio management, pre-development, product development and project management must take effect and agile development methods such as Scrum and Kanban must also be used for hardware development.

What does a change process look like that makes R&D demonstrably more efficient? How can development time and costs be significantly and permanently reduced without compromising innovation and quality? What steps does the transformation process require? The entertaining novel "Reifegrad 3" - told from the perspective of the endearing and somewhat bizarre development manager Henrik Van Weyden - provides answers to these topical management questions.

Dirk Meißner is Managing Partner and founder of CO Improve. For 25 years, he has been advising corporate units and medium-sized technology companies from the automotive industry, mechanical engineering and equipment manufacturing, agricultural technology, electronics and others on optimising their product development and has developed his own interdisciplinary and holistic maturity model for high-performance product development.