Careem’s super app vision
Head of Design
Late 2023 – Mid 2024
What it took to turn nine apps sharing a login into one product with many surfaces, and get the board to commit to it.
The challenge
Careem was the dominant super app of the Middle East: 50 million customers across nine countries. On paper, one product. In reality, nine. Each vertical optimised for its own numbers and competed with the others for homepage real estate, engineering capacity, and customer attention. The model had scaled the company but the super app experience hadn’t kept pace. Leadership knew something needed to shift but hadn’t yet aligned on what. The super app ambition wasn’t new, and the bar to get it right this time was high.
The approach
Made the case for stopping and asking a bigger question first: was Careem one product or nine? Led the brief and a six-week procurement process, and brought in an external research partner to deliver a 12-week programme rigorous enough to give the business a clear answer.
