Software Marketing Leaders Growth Forum: Becoming a Strategic Partner to Product

In September 2025, Perpetuate hosted the Software Marketing Leaders Growth Forum, an invitation-only conversation over Zoom for CMOs, VPs and Heads of Marketing from Australia's tech sector. The theme was Becoming a Strategic Partner to Product: From Feature Factories to Strategic Bets.

The Question: How Does Marketing Get Into Product Decisions Earlier?

Whether a company runs a sales-led or a product-led motion, marketers are being invited, or forcing their way, earlier into the product lifecycle. Sophia Philippou put four discussion areas to the room.

• From launch date to roadmap: how have marketers moved from being handed a launch date to influencing what gets built, and which market or customer data is most persuasive in earning credibility with Product leaders?
• Market insight on the roadmap: which structured feedback mechanisms across customers, sales and partners work best, and how do you distil noisy feedback into themes Product will act on?
• Value propositions: translating technical features into customer-centric benefits, aligning messaging to strategic bets rather than feature updates, and testing positioning before launch.
• Strategic bets: identifying the "big swings" that deserve executive attention, and getting Product, Sales, Customer Success and Marketing behind one vision.

What Came Out of the Room

Sophia's recap drew out three learnings, and one more from the group.

The Product Trio is evolving into a quad

Sophia described the trio becoming a "quad" model, with Sales and Marketing now part of the posse alongside Product, rather than Tech. Her question to the room:

Tech is the delivery engine... could this be the next operating model for product companies?

Sophia Philippou, Perpetuate, in her recap of the forum.

Bets that serve the whole market

Make product bets that serve the whole market, not just a few loud customers. At its core, the test is whether a bet will acquire or retain customers, and whether it will drive revenue or protect it.

Incentives drive behaviour

Shifting KPIs toward retention, product-market fit and quality of revenue, rather than pure sales revenue, is key to breaking silos and aligning the growth functions.

Insight has to be shared to count

A further learning from the group: competitive intelligence and voice-of-customer programmes only create impact when the insights are centralised, synthesised and shared across functions, not buried in silos.

We designed this forum for candid knowledge-sharing between peers, and the conversation delivered exactly that. It is why the Perpetuate Growth Series stays small, invitation-only and focused on senior product, design and marketing leaders across Australia. Sophia leads Perpetuate's SaaS Marketing search practice, and more of our forums and lunches are listed on the events page.