Careem’s super app vision

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.

• Secured C-suite mandate for external research, after making the case that the question was too cross-cutting for any single internal team to carry
• Set the brief and shaped a four-phase programme: business interviews, customer and Captain research, competitive and tech analysis, and collaborative synthesis workshops
• Held the line on the diagnosis through synthesis and into the boardroom: the experience had drifted from what customers and Captains actually needed at this scale
• Landed one Careem, not nine apps sharing a login as the strategic reframe that moved the verticals from products into capabilities
• Started the work to build the vision that followed: Careem as the layer between a person and their city, with AI underneath, server-driven homepage, unified design system, and a connected data model

The impact

Board-approved as the strategic direction for the company in December. The first time Careem had a coherent vision of what it meant to be a super app, with a shared answer to “what is Careem” across the leadership team. Research became a cross-company capability rather than a vertical-owned function. The customer and the Captain were back at the centre of the conversation. This was the final major piece of work I led at Careem, capping four years across function-building, team leadership, and commercial delivery.