Massage therapist transitioning to product owner
I’m currently transitioning into a Product Owner career and would really appreciate advice from people already doing the job.
My background is a little unconventional. I spent 19 years as a licensed massage therapist and built and operated my own wellness business. That taught me a lot about listening to customers, identifying pain points, making business decisions, managing priorities, and figuring things out without having someone hand me a playbook.
Over the last two years, I’ve moved into building digital products. Most recently, I took an AI-powered wellness app called Harmoni from idea to launch. I did customer discovery and gathered feedback from about 50 target users/testers, identified the overlapping pain points, defined the MVP around the strongest need, worked with a five-person development team, tested and iterated on the product, and brought it to launch in April. We currently have about 25 subscriptions. I’ve also gotten pretty good at vibe coding and made a clinician portal for my wellness app and launched it. I also built 2 other web-based apps I haven’t launched yet.
I realized through that experience that the part I really enjoy is the Product Owner side of the work: understanding what users actually need, translating that into requirements, prioritizing what gets built, working with developers, testing, iterating, and keeping the product focused.
I’m now actively applying for Product Owner roles. At the same time, I’m taking two product-focused courses (one focusing on AI) and studying Agile, Scrum, backlog management, user stories, acceptance criteria, sprint planning, Jira/Confluence, product discovery, roadmapping, and the overall software development lifecycle. I’m also practicing PM/PO interview questions regularly.
I know that taking courses isn’t a substitute for doing the job, so I’m trying to figure out where the biggest gaps are between my current experience and being genuinely effective in a professional PO role.
For current Product Owners: if you were in my position, what would you focus on learning or practicing next?
What do you wish you understood before your first PO role? What separates someone who knows the Agile/Scrum terminology from someone who is actually good at the job? And are there particular skills or concepts you think career changers tend to underestimate?
I’m not looking for a shortcut. I’m trying to make sure I’m spending my study time on things that will actually matter once I’m working with a real product and engineering team.