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As Malaysian manufacturers face increasing regulatory pressure to adopt the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), many struggle to translate operational improvements into meaningful sustainability reports due to metric overload. This study aims to formulate and empirically validate a prioritized lean-sustainability framework, bridging the gap between strategic sustainability goals and daily operational metrics. A mixed-method research design was employed, integrating Grounder Theory Quality Functional Deployment (QFD). Semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions wit industry experts identified nine critical sustainability needs and six lean improvement actions. Kendall’s Coefficient of Concordance (W) was utilized to assess expert consensus on the importance and correlation of these variables, while the House of Quality (HoQ) matrix was constructed to calculate the absolute technical importance of each lean tool. The analysis reveals that workplace communication and employee safety are the highest-ranked sustainability needs in the Malaysian context. The QFD prioritization identifies a clear hierarchy of lean interventions such as Kaizen (222.15), 5S (212.06), and Gemba (206.38) emerged as critical drivers and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) (196.47), Operational Equipment Efficiency (OEE) (143.03) and Just-In-Time (JIT)(131.69) received significantly lower priority scores. This research empirically challenges the simultaneous adoption view of lean implementation. By validating a stability first roadmap, the study demonstrating that Malaysia must prioritize cultural and foundational stability before attempting to implement advanced flow metrics to achieve holistic sustainability.