Your work have to be based on the customer's perspective. Once you defined your target customers, soliciting a solid user requirements from them is the most important determinant of a project's success or failure. Most of the failure examples are lack of user participation in design and development stage, hence the final products are not what customers wanted. Before you work on any project, please think about your customer first. The traditional product development approach is not customer-oriented.
Products are mass produced and kept in the inventory to wait for the market demand.
These things are solely for the benefit to the manufacturer without considering the customers. We, as an individual, want to have an unique product that fit my own use. Computer systems are the prime example, customers can customize their software and hardware configuration of their computer system. When production lead-time and product inventory is a matter of few days, this kind of mass customization cannot be realized without the support of technologies. Dell is doing this and has developed this as the best practice in the computer industry.