Global Ride-Hailing
Careem <> Uber
Careem <> Uber
Product Manager | Uber Communications Platform | January 2025
Key Responsibilities: Requirements Gathering, Feature Design, Prioritization,
Stakeholder Communication
Background
The year is 2020. Uber completes its acquisition of Careem, a ride-hailing service in the Middle East, for $3.1 billion. Careem, like Uber, is a super-application, offering its customers food and grocery delivery in addition to private cars.
Careem is headquartered in Dubai, UAE, while Uber is headquartered in California, USA.
Thus far, Careem and Uber have had independent and separate spheres of operation, but now, there is opportunity to merge strengths and thrive.
Goals
Careem and Uber aimed to increase their impact in individual realms. At the time, legal agreements prohibited software modifications within any vertical besides Rides. Leaving the Food and Delivery verticals untouched, Uber leveraged Careem’s regional awareness, and Careem leveraged Uber’s widespread reach.
Ultimately, both teams sought to pair Careem Riders, comfortably requesting rides through Careem’s familiar mobile interface, with Uber Drivers, physically accessible to Careem Riders but users of Uber’s Carbon mobile application for Drivers.
In pursuit of this union, Careem and Uber committed to maintaining:
Brand Image
Careem’s users as well as Uber’s users, on opposite sides of the globe, place great deals of trust in Careem and Uber.
Tangibly extending this trust, teams arranged for Riders to enjoy reliable trips and access to Customer Support when needed, with caller details anonymized throughout
Current Offerings
In prioritizing features available to Careem Rider<>Uber Driver pairs, preserving each application’s existing elements took precedence.
As such, introducing the ability to send attachments in-application, an entirely new feature, was a later milestone.
Vision
Careem’s mission to “simplify and improve the lives of people” and Uber’s mission to “reimagine the way the world moves” continued to carry the utmost weight in guiding the actions taken towards creating synergy.
Each collaborator was loyal to these overall goals in day-to-day decisions.
Process
Over several months, I gained confidence in a symbiotic end-state for Careem and Uber.
Through unrelenting collaboration with Engineers, Project Managers, and fellow Product Managers at Careem and Uber, I stretched outside of my regular domains and joined colleagues in efforts to pilot the Careem Rider<>Uber Driver pairing in Bahrain.
The granular objectives of this collaboration evolved frequently, but the collaboration, itself, consistently prioritized:
Alignment on Current-State
Originally, I was unfamiliar with the capabilities of the Careem mobile application. To this day, I haven’t requested a ride on Careem. More immediately than warranting travel to Bahrain, this merited deep-dives with authorities —my partners— on Careem’s feature set and their technical parameters.
Further, my staffing on this project followed a year-long medical leave, so, not only did I strive to learn about Careem, but I also aspired to learn about Uber’s progress in 2023.
Documentation on Focus Areas
Given the massive scale of our undertaking and the variety of experts involved in linking Careem and Uber, documentation served as a bridge between various teams. Through careful documentation, the communications needs of core services —and, later, the Marketing organization— became clear.
With partners across time zones, documenting each other’s insights and resulting decisions also lifted a dependency on redundant, oddly-timed meetings.
Invitation of Critique
Concrete steps were taken to assemble a detailed User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Plan following our initial launch in Bahrain, but feedback was solicited all along. Though trials with end-users were premature for a time, internally verifying whether one group’s designs were digestible to another was a common avenue of testing.
Sometimes, critique came even before invited!
Expanded Breadth
My knowledge on Voice Anonymization could still stand to grow, but today, there is less growth needed than there was in 2024, when our mandate was to anonymize voices of callers in search of support.
To achieve this outcome and others within our integration, I, like many colleagues, confronted knowledge gaps proactively. Awareness that a wider base of knowledge enables more substantial contributions propelled us.
Results
We went live!
With ample messaging beforehand, a pilot, which allowed Careem Riders to be paired with Uber Drivers on each user’s native application, was launched in January 2025 in Bahrain. Both parties communicate with each other across applications and were expected not to sense an impact from the integration.
UAT is ongoing (as of late 2025; now outside of my purview), and a robust schedule of market launches to follow Bahrain has been created.