A Business Novel · Reuven Sonntag
The Wall
A business novel
Honor the wish. Test the forecast.
A novel about the cost of building what everyone loves and no one buys.
A business novel about the cost of building the wrong thing, in the lineage of The Goal and The Phoenix Project.
A two-hour read for product managers, founders, and operators, about the invisible difference that decides which company survives.
WHY READ THIS
A story so you feel the problem, not just understand it.
Business books can only teach so much. Frameworks explain patterns from the outside. Case studies show what other people did. Both leave the reader with an idea, and ideas are easy to hold at a distance.
A novel works differently. The reader lives inside the room. They watch the decision get made. They feel the pull of what everyone likes and the quiet of what nobody wants to say. When the character misses the signal, the reader misses it with them. When the character sees it, the reader sees it too.
The Wall is designed for that kind of learning.
For product managers, it is a story about the judgment call that most PM books cannot teach.
For founders, it is a story about the founder's blind spot: the thing they made that nobody wants to say does not work.
For engineers and designers, it is a story about the moments when the team is being asked to build the wrong thing and cannot yet name why.
For investors, it is a story about what the pitch deck cannot show and the board meeting cannot say.
You finish the book with a repertoire. Tools for personal decisions, group decisions, and quiet reality checks that tell you whether your effort is taking the company toward the thing that will actually work.
Two hours. One durable way of seeing.
WHILE YOU WAIT
The book is not out yet. The ideas are.
I have been writing my way toward this book for years, on Substack, one essay at a time. Some of what became The Wall started as a piece there. Some of the arguments the book makes are worked through in short form, in real time, with real readers.
If you want a taste of the writing, or the thinking, or both, that is where to find it.
THE METHOD
Honor the wish. Test the forecast.
Every product starts as a wish. Someone imagines what the world will pay for and builds toward that picture. The good ideas and the bad ones look the same at the wish stage. They both feel exciting. They both attract the team. They both get funded.
The difference is not in the wish. The difference is in what happens next.
The honest builder tests the forecast. They separate what they hope people will pay for from what people will actually pay for. They design small, cheap experiments that make the truth visible before the cost of being wrong becomes unbearable.
Most builders skip this step. Not because they cannot do it. Because they do not want to know.
The Wall is a novel about what that costs.
The appendix is a one-page tool for doing it differently. If you have an idea you are not yet sure about, and you want to know whether it survives contact with reality before you spend the year of your life on it, the Forecast Test is where to start.
About
Who wrote this
Reuven Sonntag has spent his career in product management, at companies including Huawei, Booking.com, and Zalando, across Latin America, Europe, and Israel. He holds a master's in computer science from Imperial College London and trained first as an electrical engineer. The rooms in this book are ones he has sat in. The Wall is his first novel.