Whirlpool : Driving Change

Auto Industry Veteran Pat Schiavone Cultivates a Cooperative Culture as Whirlpool Corporation's Design VP

By: Cean Burgeson

'I get asked one question a lot,' says Pat Schiavone, Whirlpool Corporation's vice president of global consumer design and a veteran of the auto industry for more than 20 years. 'How could you leave the world of auto design for the boring world of appliances?'

The answer, for him, is simple. 'I had done everything in cars that could be done and really my hobbies had gone away from cars to home design. I really love architecture and interior design,' explains Schiavone. 'After I spoke with Whirlpool initially, I woke up at about 6 a.m. one Sunday morning and went to my local Home Depot in Southfield. I walked into the appliance department and I could see immediately what was going on.' What was going on, he says, was opportunity.

'I felt like we could change the industry,' Schiavone says. 'Just by looking at appliances, I could see it was a commodity-based industry. There were design ideas that everyone would steal from each other. I saw a huge opportunity instead to do the same kind of thing you do in the automobile industry, which is to really hook the customer with exciting products. The reason I took this job is that I believed people care just as much about what's in their home as they do about what's in their garage - and I would even argue more.'

The timing was right. Schiavone wanted a change and Whirlpool was ready for a one as well. 'The auto industry is about a sexy product,' he says. 'That's how we did it and that's how we won. Taking a little bit of what I did naturally for 20-some years in the auto industry was one of the reasons Whirlpool was looking for somebody like myself from a product design/product development background.'

What the design team at Whirlpool Corporation has been doing under Schiavone for the past eight years isn't just product development, however. 'Our biggest opportunities are in having products that customers fall in love with,' explains Schiavone, 'and that means not just in design, but in the user experience and the user technologies that go with it.'

This transition to a new way of thinking about product development didn't happen overnight. The process started with building the right team, one member at a time. 'We started to look for the best designers in the world,' says Schiavone. 'It's taken a few years to get that team together, but I can now say that we have the best design team in the world of appliance manufacturing.'

Of course, with change like this, there's sometimes resistance. Overcoming that resistance takes some momentum building, and that momentum comes from faith in a shared vision and by building a track record of successful product launches. That includes pioneering the market with the Black Stainless finish for kitchen appliances back in 2014 and innovating with color and finish continuously year after year with products such as the iconic KitchenAid stand mixer. Another breakthrough was the Obsidian interior, an all-black finish that had never been done inside a refrigerator until Jenn-Air brand released it in 2015.

Determining design trends like these that people will want to bring into their homes for the next 10-15 years takes some skill as well as guts to pull off. 'In my mind it's never been around asking the consumer what they want in five years,' says Schiavone. 'We understand the products better than the customers do, so it's up to us to invent the new trends.

That's where he says the 'three-legged stool' comes in. Those legs are made up of design, engineering and marketing, all working together to create a product and a belief system that supports further development of successful products. 'You gotta believe in the work that we're doing and everyone all the way up to leadership has to support that in order to allow us to keep the right energy going,' says Schiavone. 'It's truly a momentum building scenario and it always has been.'

Bold product design also requires a certain amount of culture change, Schiavone points out. 'It's not just a design culture change, but a whole company culture change,' he says. This process involved taking the traditional model of using consumer and trade feedback to design appliances and standing it on its head; instead using trends and product knowledge developed over the course of decades to create products that consumers may not have even expected.

'The combination of all those people working together through re-loops and discussion, that's how you make magic,' explains Schiavone. 'Again, it's about that three-legged stool and how much stronger we are working together than if we're working individually. The other legs inform us as much as we inform them. It shouldn't be about us fighting internally. It should be about us fighting the competition. If everything is working right and we're all doing our jobs, it all comes together as a force of its own.'