Walid Boulanouar recently shared something that caught my attention: "quick poll for builders 👇

if you had to choose one today, what would it be?" It is a tiny post with a big builder instinct behind it.

When someone asks builders to choose one thing today, they are not just fishing for comments. They are pointing at a universal tension in product and company building: you never get everything at once. You choose, you trade off, you live with the consequences, and you learn.

In this post, I want to expand on Walid's prompt and explore why a simple poll can spark better decisions, clearer priorities, and stronger communities.

The hidden power of "choose one"

Walid Boulanouar's question works because it forces compression. Most teams have a backlog of plausible next steps:

Ship a new feature or fix reliability
Improve onboarding or run marketing experiments
Hire more people or automate with AI
Build for power users or simplify for beginners

But the reality of time, cash, attention, and execution capacity means you rarely can do all of them now. A "choose one" prompt makes you state what you believe is the highest leverage move.

Key insight: If you cannot explain your top priority in one sentence, you probably do not have a top priority.

This is why the word "today" matters. It eliminates fantasy roadmaps and focuses on the next actionable decision.

Why builders love polls (and why they work on LinkedIn)

Walid framed it as a "quick poll for builders". That is smart community language. Builders like to compare notes, but they do not always want a long debate. A poll invites low-friction participation and creates a shared object to react to.

From a content strategy perspective, the post hits three things that consistently drive engagement:

Clarity: One short question, no extra context required.
Identity: It calls out a specific tribe (builders).
Constraint: "Choose one" creates tension, and tension creates comments.

People do not only answer. They explain. And when they explain, the comment section becomes a mini playbook of real-world trade-offs.

Turning the poll into a decision framework

If I were to respond directly to Walid Boulanouar's prompt as a builder, I would treat it as a structured decision tool. Here is a practical way to run the same exercise inside your team.

A poll fails when the options are vague or too many. Create options that are mutually exclusive and decision-relevant.

Examples:

Stability vs new features
Distribution vs product depth
Manual services vs self-serve
Hire specialists vs automate workflows

Step 2: Make the trade-off explicit

The most useful polls include the cost of choosing.

Instead of:

"Ship feature A"

Try:

"Ship feature A (delays performance work by 2 weeks)"

This reduces performative answers and increases realistic ones.

Key insight: A priority is only real when you can name what you are deprioritizing.

Step 3: Ask for the reason, not just the vote

On LinkedIn, a poll gets clicks. A question gets thinking.

A simple follow-up line like "Drop your reasoning in the comments" turns a binary choice into a knowledge exchange.

Inside a team, do the same. Require one sentence:

"I choose X because..."

Those sentences become a record of your assumptions.

Step 4: Decide based on evidence, not volume

This matters especially when you use polls publicly. The loudest answer is not always right for your product.

Treat the results as input, then validate with:

Customer interviews
Usage data (activation, retention, churn)
Sales cycle feedback
Support ticket themes

Common "choose one" dilemmas builders face

Walid did not specify the options in the post, which is part of its versatility. Here are a few classic versions of the question, plus how I think about them.

Shipping vs polishing

If users do not feel the pain yet, shipping wins. If users feel pain daily, polishing wins.

A rule of thumb:

Pre-product-market fit: ship learning
Post-product-market fit: ship reliability

Product vs distribution

Many builders overbuild and under-distribute. But pure distribution without product truth collapses.

A balanced take:

If you cannot explain why you win, invest in product clarity.
If people love it but nobody knows, invest in distribution.

Hiring vs automating (the AI era version)

Given Walid's background in AI agents and automation tooling, this is an especially relevant angle.

Ask:

Is the work repetitive and well-defined? Automate it.
Is the work ambiguous and cross-functional? Hire for it.

Also consider the maintenance cost. Automations are not free. They are systems that need ownership.

Key insight: Automate tasks, not accountability. Someone still owns the outcome.

Speed vs focus

Speed is a multiplier, but focus is the direction. Without focus, speed just gets you lost faster.

If you are debating, choose focus first:

One customer segment
One core job-to-be-done
One primary channel

Then apply speed to that.

Making the post "blog-worthy": what I would answer if asked today

If Walid Boulanouar put me on the spot with "if you had to choose one today", I would answer:

Choose the one move that increases your rate of learning.

That usually means something like:

Talk to 5 users this week and rewrite onboarding based on what you hear
Ship the smallest testable improvement and measure activation
Remove a friction point that shows up in support every day

Why? Because builders do not win by being busy. They win by compounding insight into better decisions.

A content lesson builders can steal from Walid

Walid's post is also a reminder that you do not need a long thread to create value. A short prompt can work if it:

Targets a clear audience
Creates a constrained choice
Invites reasoning

If you are building your own LinkedIn content strategy, try a weekly "choose one" series. Keep it consistent, and vary the domain:

Engineering trade-offs
Go-to-market choices
Team and hiring decisions
Tooling and automation bets

Over time, you will attract people who think in trade-offs, not just opinions.

Closing thought

Walid Boulanouar's "quick poll for builders" is deceptively simple. It works because it mirrors the daily reality of building: you pick one, you commit, and you learn. If you turn that into a habit, both your product decisions and your content will get sharper.

This blog post expands on a viral LinkedIn post by Walid Boulanouar, get one engineer with swarm of agents | aiCTO ay automate & humanoidz | building with n8n, a2a, cursor & ☕ | advisor | first ai agents talent recruiter. View the original LinkedIn post →

Walid Boulanouar's Builder Poll and the One Choice