Find the Right Product Leader
Perpetuate’s Product Leadership practice places senior product leaders for DeepTech, HardTech, and B2B SaaS companies, headhunting passive, in-demand talent who aren’t applying anywhere else. Led by Sophia Philippou, we never use job ads: 2-3 shortlisted candidates in 5-10 days.
Which product leadership roles does Perpetuate place?
The Product Leadership practice covers the full spectrum of senior product leadership: from a company’s first product hire to scaling a multi-pod product organisation. Sophia Philippou leads every search personally.
How Sophia Sources
Sophia's search begins inside Australia's product community, long before a role opens. Ongoing relationships with the country's senior product leaders mean she can often name the right candidate from memory, then start the outreach the same day.
Executive
Chief Product Officer
First product hire through board-level CPO. Off-market headhunting for venture-backed DeepTech and B2B SaaS companies scaling from $10M to $50M ARR.
Senior Leadership
VP of Product
Operational product leaders who own roadmap, discovery, and cross-functional delivery. For Series B and beyond companies building distributed product organisations.
Specialist Leadership
Head of Product Marketing
Leaders who translate product strategy into positioning, launch, and go-to-market motion for technical, high-consideration products.
Senior IC + Head
Head of Product
Heads of Product and Principal Product Managers where product judgement is the primary differentiator and IC-to-leadership pipeline matters.
Executive
Chief Design Officer
Design leadership for companies where product experience is the primary differentiator, spanning UX research, service design, and design systems.
Senior Leadership
VP of Growth
Product-led growth leaders who own activation, retention, and expansion loops. For companies where growth is a product discipline, not a marketing budget line.
Specialist Leadership
Director of Product Analytics
Leaders who own experimentation, product analytics, and data-informed roadmap decisions for companies where instrumentation is still catching up to ambition.
Senior Leadership
VP of Product & Design
Senior and executive-adjacent leaders who own product and design together across growing organisations spanning traditional SaaS and applied AI product surfaces.
Senior IC
Staff & Principal Product Managers
High-leverage individual-contributor hiring for Staff and Principal Product Managers: PMs who set product strategy and mentor senior teams without moving into people management.
Hiring a technical leader at the same time? Our Technical Leadership practice, led by Stephen Tung, runs the same off-market process for CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and senior technical talent.
What does a product leadership search actually look like in practice?
A CPO search through Perpetuate Talent requires one hour of a founder’s time. In that hour, we build the brief, craft the pitch, and begin outreach to passive candidates. Most founders describe the process as “the opposite of what I expected from a recruiter.”
1 hr
founder brief
5-10
days to shortlist
2-3
pre-vetted candidates
Day 1
1-hour brief
One focused session. We learn the company, the product surface, the hard problems, and what kind of product leader would find this compelling.
Days 2-5
Off-market outreach
Proactive, personalised outreach to passive candidates identified through the Talent System. No job boards. No advertised roles. Each pitch is bespoke.
Days 5-10
2-3 qualified candidates
A curated shortlist. Every candidate has been assessed for product judgement, leadership track record, and cultural fit for your specific company.
Through offer
Dual-side diligence
We manage both sides. The candidate stays informed and engaged. You stay focused on running the business. We carry the process through to signed offer.
How do we find CPOs who aren’t actively looking?
The best product leaders are already running product teams somewhere else. They’re not updating their LinkedIn profile or replying to generic recruiter messages. Every search we run starts with a simple premise: the person you need has never heard of your company.
Concentric circle signal recognition
We map the product leadership talent pool around your company’s specific domain, then work outward through degrees of separation. Who built the product you’re trying to build, but somewhere else? Who trained under the people who did? That’s where the search begins.
Pattern matching, not keyword matching
A CPO who scaled a product-led growth product from first users to 50,000 sign-ups looks nothing like one who took a hardware-adjacent platform from prototype to enterprise buyer. We read for the right signals: product judgement, cross-functional leadership under constraint, and domain adjacency to your problem.
A pitch built from one hour with you
We spend one hour with you. We learn what the product actually does, what hard problems remain unsolved, and why an excellent product leader would find this the most interesting thing they could work on. That story becomes the outreach. Most candidates we approach have never heard a pitch like it.
A shortlist in 5-10 days, not 5-10 weeks
Most founders who’ve hired through traditional agencies describe the process as two months of noise followed by a final candidate they could have found themselves. A Perpetuate Product Leadership search delivers 2-3 candidates within 10 days, each one personally reviewed by Sophia Philippou before introduction.
What founders say about Perpetuate’s product searches
“Their profound understanding of our cultural dynamics, technical requirements, and the intensity needed for success in our fast-paced environment has set them apart. The consistently high quality and diverse pool of candidates presented to us in a timely manner have empowered us to engage with exceptionally strong individuals and ultimately make the right hiring decisions.”
Jason Cooper, CEO & Managing Director of Envirosuite (ASX:EVS)
One of five roles Perpetuate placed for Envirosuite was Chief Product Officer
Which companies is the Product Leadership practice built for?
Perpetuate Talent’s Product Leadership practice works exclusively with founders and CEOs who are themselves product-native: companies where product judgement is the differentiator, and a generalist or title-driven hire would slow things down rather than accelerate them.
Founding-stage companies hiring their first product leader. Series A and B scaleups replacing a Head of Product who has hit their ceiling. Venture-backed SaaS companies where the product surface is complex and the market hasn’t been mapped yet.
In every case, the brief starts from first principles: what does this company actually need its product to do, and who has already done something close to it?
✓ DeepTech and HardTech
✓ Venture-backed scaleups
✓ Verticalised B2B SaaS
✓ Product-native founders
Meet Sophia and the rest of the team on our About page.
Your next Head of Product is already employed somewhere else.
Perpetuate Talent’s Product Leadership practice sources and delivers 2-3 off-market, pre-vetted shortlisted candidates within 5-10 days. One hour of your time to brief us. That’s it.
Brief Sophia on your search