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-app that offers its customers food and grocery delivery in addition to private cars.
Careem is headquartered in Dubai, UAE, while Uber is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Thus far, each application has an independent and separate sphere of operation, but now, there is an opportunity to merge strengths and thrive.
Goals
Careem and Uber aimed to increase their impact in individual sphere of operation. At the time, legal agreements dictated that modifications were in scope only for the Rides vertical on either application.
So, 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 the familiar Careem 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 their 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 via in-app chat, an entirely new capability, was a later milestone.
Vision
Careem’s mission to “simplify and improve the lives of people” 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 applied a sense of loyalty to these overall missions.
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.
This objectives of this collaboration evolved frequently, but the collaboration, itself, took the form of:
Conversations on Current-State
At the time of this partnership, I was not familiar with the capabilities of the Careem mobile application. To this day, I have not requested a car on Careem. More immediately than warranting travel to Bahrain, this merited deep-dives with experts on both Careem’s feature set and the technical parameters of these features.
Further, my participation in this project followed my year-long medical leave, so not only did I strive to learn about Careem, but I also aimed to learn about Uber’s progress in 2023.
Documentation of Differences
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 the Marketing organization became clear.
Additionally, with partners across time zones, documenting each other’s insights and resulting decisions reduced the dependency on redundant, oddly-timed meetings.
Invitation of Critique
Concrete steps were taken to assemble a detailed User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Plan following the initial launch in Bahrain, but feedback was solicited all along. Though end-users were inaccessible, internally verifying whether one group’s designs were digestible to another was a common avenue of testing.
Sometimes, critiques came before invited!
Expansion of Breadth of Knowledge
I’ll admit that my knowledge of Voice Anonymization could stand to grow, but today, there is less growth needed than there was in 2024, when the mandate was to anonymize voices of callers from Careem and Uber in search of support.
To achieve this outcome and others within this integration, I confronted knowledge gaps proactively, aware that a wider base of knowledge enables more substantial contributions.
Results
We went live!
With ample messaging beforehand, a pilot wherein Careem Riders could be paired with Uber Drivers was launched in January 2025.
Both parties can communicate with each other across applications. Native Careem as well as native Uber users are expected not to sense an impact from the integration.
UAT is ongoing (though now outside of my purview), and a robust schedule of market launches to follow Bahrain has been created.