FYI, for future searches, you can safely omit "perl" from "perl product" (what's next, "perl array" ? :)).

However, with the loop and all, it seems like a terribly inefficient method of doing such a thing. Anyone have a smarter way?

Why does it seem inefficient? It's the most straight forward way to accomplish the task. Maybe not as "elegant" (matter of opinion) as

sub product {
    my $list = shift;
    my $prod = 1;

    $prod *= $_ for @$list;

    return $prod;
}
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but it's pretty much as efficient as it gets.