Product Leaders Forum: Connecting Product Strategy to Commercial Outcomes

On 14 May 2025, Perpetuate hosted its first Product Leaders Forum, the first event in the series. Product leaders from diverse backgrounds across Australia joined an invitation-only conversation over Zoom on Connecting Product Strategy to Commercial Outcomes.

What the Forum Set Out to Explore

Sophia Philippou described commercial acumen as one of the most critical, and often underdeveloped, muscles in Product Management teams. The forum went deep on it, and the agenda slide below, headed "Some things to talk about", shows where the conversation began.

If a PM can't tell the CEO/CFO in 2 minutes how their work moved the dial, they've missed the mark.

One guest, quoted in Sophia Philippou's recap.

What Came Out of the Room

Five takeaways stood out.

• Build commercial literacy. Give PMs exposure to pricing models, negotiations and vendors, and the company's annual report. In Sophia's words, "Commercial acumen ain't learned in Jira."
• Tie product work to business impact. Use attribution models, impact mapping and Lean Canvas to quantify how features move the needle on engagement, retention, lifetime value (LTV) or churn.
• Frame decisions with strategy in mind. What is the size of the opportunity? What assumptions are baked in? How do we de-risk?
• Start early. Involve PMs in upfront total addressable market (TAM) mapping, research and sales calls, and ask directly: "Would you pay for this new feature? How much would you pay?"
• Get closer to finance. Seek access to CapEx and Opex, revenue modelling and budget forecasting. As Sophia put it, when product and finance align, magic happens.

What It Asks of a Product Team

Read together, the five points make one argument. A PM who can talk in pricing, retention, revenue and budget gets heard by the CEO and CFO, and that fluency comes from sitting in sales calls and finance conversations early, not from the backlog.

This was the first event in what became the Perpetuate Growth Series: candid, peer-level, invitation-only conversations for senior product, design and marketing leaders across Australia. Sophia ended her recap by thanking everyone who joined and shared, and by saying the forums were "just getting started". Sophia leads Perpetuate's Product search practice, and the forums and lunches that followed are listed on the events page.