Management mindset

In the previous three articles, we explored the journey of Lean Startup as a mindset of learning-based management, the use of MVPs to understand the market, and—most importantly—how to awaken organizations to real data. But Lean cannot survive long if it only lives at the product or process level.

Ultimately, Lean must go through people.

Each Build–Measure–Learn loop is not only a cycle for products—it is also a cycle for team development. No matter how high-tech a startup is, it is still a story of people: founders who dare to dream and learn, early employees who believe in what no one else sees, and a culture that accepts mistakes as part of finding the right path.

After ten years of working with hundreds of startups in Vietnam, KisStartup has found that one of the key factors determining a startup’s resilience lies not in ideas or capital, but in how they build their team and learning culture. Lean Thinking has become the most powerful tool for developing “entrepreneurial people” — fast, flexible, humble in failure, and bold enough to try again.

Lean doesn’t just teach product building — it teaches people management

Eric Ries wrote, “Entrepreneurship is management.” Yet few realize that “management” in Lean refers not just to managing systems, but to managing people under uncertainty.
A startup in its early days often lacks an HR department, formal training programs, or clear KPIs. Everything is created “while doing and learning.” And within that chaos, organizational culture takes root.

When coaching startups, we often start with a simple question:

“If you hire one more person tomorrow, what do you want them to bring — skills, energy, or a new perspective?”

This question helps the team identify assumptions about people—just like identifying assumptions about customers.
Many founders realize they hire people “like themselves” for comfort, but what a startup needs are complementary people—those who can ask hard questions, challenge old habits, and fill gaps in capability.

Lean thinking teaches founders to test, measure, and learn — so why not apply the same cycle to recruiting and developing people?

Drawing the “Team Persona” — A Lesson from Lean Personas

In Lean Startup, we use the concept of Customer Persona — a profile of the target customer, built from real data. At KisStartup, we expand this into Team Persona — a profile of the ideal person for the current stage of the startup.

An agricultural startup we coached once made the mistake of hiring “senior managers” too early—experienced professionals who lacked an experimental mindset. Conflicts quickly arose: the original team wanted to “test and learn,” while the newcomers wanted to “make things professional right away.”
After several failed iterations, they returned to the Team Persona exercise, defining who they really needed for the next six months—not an experienced manager, but a data-driven engineer who embraced trial and error.

Once they made that shift, the team atmosphere changed dramatically.
They stopped evaluating people by title and started valuing them by how quickly they could learn and adapt. Most importantly, they began to view recruitment itself as a Lean experiment: each hiring round as an MVP, each candidate as a hypothesis, and each probation period as a Build–Measure–Learn cycle.

Co-founders and the Trust Loop

Nothing is leaner than a small founding team that truly understands one another. Yet a co-founder is not just someone to share the workload with — they must share the same learning philosophy.
KisStartup has seen many projects fail simply because the founders didn’t learn at the same rhythm. One wanted to “act fast,” the other wanted to “research more.” One wanted to prove the idea, the other wanted to learn from data. When learning loops are out of sync, teams fracture.

A tourism startup we supported had to pause operations after a year. The issue wasn’t the lack of customers, but disagreement between two founders: one relied on intuition, the other insisted on data.
After taking time to “pause and learn,” they came back with a new mindset:

“We don’t need someone to be right — we just need the data to be right.”

They agreed that every debate would end with a small measurable test. When both committed to the Build–Measure–Learn loop, trust grew stronger. Lean thus became a management framework for trust — not blind trust, but trust validated by action.

A Culture of Failure — and Learning from It

There is no Lean without failure. Yet in Vietnam, “failure” remains a heavy word. Many founders speak of Lean but avoid confronting real data for fear of bad results. They prefer surveys showing “positive signals” and reports of “steady growth,” but rarely ask the hard question: “Why did customers leave?”

At KisStartup, we organize Learning Review sessions where teams openly examine what didn’t go as planned. For many, it’s their first time “failing in public.”
One founder said, “I thought Lean was to avoid failure. Turns out Lean is to fail the right way.”

That realization marked a turning point.

Accepting failure doesn’t mean ignoring mistakes—it means transforming them into learning assets.
In one edtech team, after their first MVP failed, they held a “Failure Learning Ceremony.” Each member shared what they learned, rewrote initial assumptions, and analyzed why they were wrong. That Failure Report became a valuable resource for their next test. Six months later, they successfully raised funding.

A culture that accepts failure doesn’t just strengthen resilience—it unleashes creativity. When people aren’t afraid of being wrong, they dare to propose, experiment, and learn. Lean cannot thrive in judgment; it only grows in psychological safety.

From “Doers” to “Learners”

Startups often seek “people who can get things done,” but Lean teaches us to seek “people who can learn things fast.”
In a world where technology changes rapidly, specific skills can become obsolete overnight, but the ability to learn quickly and adapt remains invaluable.

A smart agriculture startup in Đồng Nai struggled as its technicians were used to taking orders, not experimenting. After joining KisStartup’s mentorship program, they restructured internal training: each new engineer received a learning problem instead of a technical task.
For example, instead of “calibrate the sensor,” they got “investigate why soil humidity readings fluctuate.” Each week, they presented what they learned—not just results. Within two months, the technical team began proposing proactive improvements. They no longer waited for directions—they built their own Build–Measure–Learn loops.

Lean doesn’t create “perfect employees”; it creates people who know how to self-improve.

Lean Culture — From Process to Habit

Many companies try to “install Lean” through checklists, KPIs, and processes, forgetting that Lean cannot be imposed. It’s a collective habit, formed by small, repeated actions.

When KisStartup supported a software company scaling from 10 to 50 people, the biggest challenge wasn’t technical—it was maintaining the try–measure–learn spirit as they grew.
They decided to keep three weekly rituals inspired by Lean:

1. Monday Learning Hour: Each team shares one insight from customer data or feedback.
2. Thursday Experiment Day: Four hours to test a small idea without needing approval.
3. Friday Reflection: The whole team answers three questions: “What did we learn this week?”; “What surprised us?”; “What will we test next week?”

These simple, low-cost rituals sustained a rhythm of learning and openness. When people feel they have the right to learn and the right to fail, Lean spreads naturally—no enforcement needed.

Lean for People — Not to Cut Costs, But to Grow Teams

In Vietnam, “lean” is often misunderstood as “cutting people, cutting costs.” But in the Lean philosophy KisStartup follows, lean means eliminating waste so people have more space to learn and create.
Every startup begins with limited resources. Each person must be a doer, a learner, and an improver.

In a small ecotourism startup in Lâm Đồng, unable to afford a marketing specialist, the founder trained tour guides to tell product stories and manage the fanpage. Within three months, not only did they save costs, but they also built an authentic and relatable brand voice.
They weren’t perfect—but they were flexible enough to learn whatever was needed to survive. That’s Lean in its most vibrant form.

Connecting People and Organizations — The Double Learning Loop

A truly Lean organization is where both individuals and the system learn. Individuals learn to adapt; the organization learns not to repeat mistakes. KisStartup calls this the double-loop learning:

• The first loop is do–measure–learn.
• The second loop is learn how to learn—reflecting on whether the learning process itself is effective.
• Many startups fail after three years not because the market changes, but because they stop learning how to learn. When reflection stops, Lean dies quietly within old habits.

Lean Begins with Products, but Matures Through People

After ten years, KisStartup has seen Lean Startup in Vietnam evolve—from a method to a mindset, from products to culture.
If the MVP is a tool to learn about the market, people are the tool to learn about ourselves.

A startup may change its product ten times, but if the team learns nothing each time, all effort is wasted. Conversely, a learning team will always find new products, new models—even new companies.

Lean teaches us that agility is not about speed, but about the ability to learn and unlearn when data proves us wrong.
And only when people are freed from the fear of failure can organizations truly become lean.

“A startup that learns from failure is still alive.
An organization that learns from its people will live long.”
— KisStartup, 10 Years of Lean Startup in Vietnam

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