Build, Measure, Learn: The Heart of Kaizen-Driven Growth

As a Kaizen business consultant with over 40 years of experience working in Canada and the US, I’ve helped dozens of organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, adapt to Modern Ways of Working to improve productivity, enhance employee engagement, and reduce costs — these are not mutually exclusive goals; rather, they are complementary.

In my experience as a business consultant, Kaizen isn’t simply a process–it’s a mindset. One of the most powerful frameworks I help organizations to unlock is implementing a Culture of Experimentation using Eric Ries’s Build, Measure, Learn (BML) loop, from The Lean Startup. When combined with Kaizen thinking, Build, Measure, Learn becomes a robust engine for sustainable growth, and it’s increasingly important as we move into 2026, with businesses facing incredible market volatility both in international and domestic markets.

Kaizen + Build-Measure-Learn: A Perfect Fit

Kaizen, rooted in Japanese operational excellence, means “change for the better.” It emphasizes minor, incremental improvements made every day by everyone. On the other hand, the Build, Measure, Learn cycle is an iterative process that I use to help businesses transform new ideas into tested hypotheses. In brief, I guide clients through building a Minimum Lovable  Product, measuring its performance, and learning from the outcomes to maximize customer satisfaction–all while controlling costs.

Voice of the Customer

A key difference in my approach is customer voice – I introduce systems to standardize routine customer feedback, so it becomes central to research, experimentation, and decision-making. 

The benefit for organizations adopting the Build, Measure, Learn approach is that they dramatically shorten the feedback cycle, thereby reducing investment and costs. Rather than waiting months to launch a “perfect” product, you release a simple MLP, collect data, and learn in real time. This rapid product cycle aligns well with Kaizen’s philosophy of rapid improvement –an approach that enables organizations to be more responsive, less wasteful, and better aligned with customer needs.

One core strength of Build, Measure, Learn is validated learning. Organizations that guess at what their end users want are frequently wrong. In some cases, users may not even know what they want. Did anyone know they wanted an iPhone before Steve Jobs invented it? Maximizing growth and saving money means organizations have to make decisions grounded in evidence. They have to be ready to make quick pivots when the market shifts–and they need systems that allow them to test assumptions against real behaviour.

Cultivating a Growth Mindset

Kaizen isn’t about perfection; it’s about constant progress. The Build, Measure, Learn process reinforces that by encouraging experimentation and safe-to-fail experiments. Organizations must learn that experimentation is an integral part of business. Failure is okay as long as time and costs are contained, because in BML, organizations fail forward. If a hypothesis is disproven, it still brings the organization closer to a correct answer–or a better product.

BML for Innovation

For organizations that truly want to innovate, to delight their end users with exceptional goods and services, cultivating a culture of BML is essential. BML builds psychological safety in your team. In many cases, it’s key to unlocking the entrepreneurial spirit and fueling a culture where innovation is normalized, not feared.

Bringing Kaizen and BML to Your Team

As a Kaizen business consultant, I work with teams that want to make the Build, Measure, Learn approach part of their culture. BML is about more than product development – it’s a process that fuels process changes, operational workflows, and even business model pivots. By embedding BML into Kaizen culture, I can demonstrate how to scale up innovation across your entire organization, not just in engineering, but also in marketing, operations, customer service, and beyond.

Learn more by calling 416.528.7990 or by using our contact page.