Rebuilding Careem Plus

The challenge

Plus had launched, spiked, and then plateaued at 8,000 subscribers. The number had been sitting there for over a year and was starting to decline. The product had been built on guesswork and competitor benchmarking rather than research, and the foundational customer data needed to make better calls wasn’t in place. Internal confidence in Plus had quietly drained. The strategic logic was sound. A subscription bundling rides, food, and groceries was the right shape for what Careem was trying to become. The problem wasn’t the product. It was the thinking around it.

The approach

Reset how Plus was run. Pushed for proper data tracking, made the case for dedicated research capability, and partnered closely with a new commercial lead to reshape the operating model. Ran three parallel studies (brand perception, pricing, end-to-end usability) that surfaced a product missing customer needs at every stage, then rebuilt Plus around a service blueprint that organised every touchpoint into one connected system.

• Cut the price from AED 39 to AED 19 based on a Gabor-Granger pricing study, which changed who Plus was designed for, and introduced caps to align value usage with subscription economics
• Rotated between acquisition, engagement, retention and reactivation as parallel workstreams rather than letting the headline-grabbing ones swallow all the effort
• Fixed retention first (“acquiring customers into a leaky bucket is wasted money”), making savings visible in context, building a dedicated Care experience for Plus subscribers, and clearing the technical issues that had been silently driving cancellations
• Rebuilt the cancellation flow on one principle: make the experience good enough that customers walked away willing to come back
• Flipped acquisition from upfront commitment with generic pitches to free trial with personalised, contextual offers shaped by how each customer actually used Careem
• Made Plus show up where customers already were rather than buried in profile menus, leading every interaction with how much they’d saved and how to save more

The impact

Plus grew from 8,000 subscribers to 100,000, then to 300,000+ once the cross-vertical alignment work landed. Retention held at 90% past six months. Average customer savings reached AED 71 a month. Highest CSAT and CES of any Careem product during my time leading the work. Plus became the proof the super app could work, the first time the company could see what its services pulling together under one banner looked like in customer behaviour, not just on a strategy slide. What was once the black sheep of the family running at 8,000 subscribers had become one of Careem’s strongest commercial stories.