Movers & Shakers: Mona Phaff, Logic PD

A look at the people behind the numbers in area business:

Title: Vice president of design and engineering

Age: 54

Mona Phaff is working to help clients develop connected products that will boost their growth as the newly hired vice president of design and engineering at Logic PD, a Minneapolis product development company. Phaff was a Logic PD client before she joined the company, having hired it to assist her team with development work while at a previous employer.

"As I met with more people in the company, I realized they were really on the forefront of providing life cycle management for connected devices and services, which was very interesting," Phaff said. Phaff is a 30-year industry veteran with extensive leadership and systems engineering experience in developing electromechanical and software products.

One of few women in her computer science classes at Michigan State University, Phaff has been active with extracurricular programs that encourage young women to go into engineering, including Technovation and the Minnesota affiliate of the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

"It's difficult for young women to see the connection between being good at math or enjoying science or robotics competitions and a career," Phaff said. "What I've come to realize is it's important for engineers of all ages and industries to reach back and inspire and mentor young women to pursue STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] careers." Logic PD, which also has offices in Boston and San Diego, offers services in analytics and research; design, engineering and manufacturing and product support.

A: Being able to rapidly integrate the technology, the market knowledge, the manufacturing capability and the support services and get to market now is the biggest challenges for companies that try to realize the value of connected products quickly. We've already solved these problems for other companies and we're able to use our capabilities to accelerate the time to market for our customers in this new market space.

Q: What is new at Logic PD?

A: Logic PD traditionally offers design and engineering services, contract manufacturing and product support. Our new areas of focus are working with customers to help them do market research and analytics as well as providing subscription services to support connected products and realize the value of the data coming from those products.

Q: How did you decide to go into engineering?

A: I liked solving puzzles and was good at math but didn't want to be a math teacher. I asked my high school math teacher for advice and she suggested a computer science major. I'd never seen a computer or written a program but did some research and I was hooked.