This is not about how IKEA packs their boxes or how they’ve made balls of meat synonymous with an entire country.

No, it’s about the big blue and yellow buildings where you visit the company’s many products.

You are greeted with an escalator straight to the showroom when you walk in the doors. It’s like there’s an invisible river pushing you in this singular direction. And those rapids continue to carry you once upstairs:

You’ll move from living rooms to offices to kitchens to dinings…

Unless you grasp something growing on the banks and hurl yourself through one of those “shortcuts,” you’re going the longcut.

In each of these areas, you’ll find numerous examples of IKEA products in action. You’ll see combinations of rugs, coffee tables and accent chairs. There are low cabinets with massive fake flat-screen televisions. I’ve walked through multiple teeny, tiny, fully-furnished apartments that feel roomier than they should — because they have no ceilings!

IKEA transforms the top floor of its enormous store into thousands of use cases for its baggebos and orreslätts.

With these ideas swirling in your head, you walk down the stairs to the warehouse. You grab a cart and begin to implement some of what you witnessed upstairs. If the showroom is a river, natural and smooth, the warehouse is a manmade structure tuned to efficiency.

The warehouse is made of aisles, each with numbers and labels. Go only where your products are stored and heft the appropriate box into your cart.

Then move on!

At this point, you’re ready. You’ve already imagined your new bedroom or workspace. Now you merely need to collect all the right parts to make it happen.

IKEA is a dev tool that can make modern interiors.

And it’s a layout lesson you can apply to how you present your own actual dev tools.

So much attention is given to documentation, but that’s just the warehouse. It’s the last step, once someone already knows exactly what they’re building.

Could you improve your docs? Sure, probably.

For the vast majority of dev tools, there’s a lot more to build out in your showroom: where you inspire developers with the possibilities, share complete examples, and outline the many use cases they’ll be able to build once they get down to the warehouse.

Increasingly, your showroom has another audience: LLMs being trained on your capabilities. Use cases factor into every stage of the developer journey.

You want to inspire developers directly, and also the bots who will later inspire more of those developers.