Sweden
Strategic Product Director experienced in scaling and leading high performing teams. Driven by improving the life of others, passionate about solving complex problems and proud of playing a key role in building and scaling Careem; the leading car-hailing app and first unicorn from the Middle East. Key competencies: Thought Leadership, Problem Solving, Conceptualization and Strategic Thinking
On a mission to enable companies to wow their customers by collecting, understanding and acting on internal and external customer feedback.
• Developing the strategy and vision for the Marketplace unit at Careem that is responsible for the matching and pairing capabilities and experience for customers and captains. Creating roadmaps for the Dispatching, ETA, Peak Pricing, Locations and Payments teams and defining top-level KPIs to align with the vision of Careem. • Building cross-functional Product, Engineering and Data Science teams. Creating environments and processes where teams can be autonomous, agile and data driven to enable fast and impactful delivery by consistently listening and addressing feedback from the teams. Grew teams from 0 to 50+. • Leading teams on large, top priority projects from conceptualization to delivery to create step-changing growth. • Mentoring and coaching a team of Product Managers setting their objectives, identifying their competency gaps and putting development action plans in place. • Managing very close relationships with Co-founders, VPs, Product Leadership and city teams, setting and aligning on priorities, resourcing and deliverables. • Establishing channels to integrate feedback into the business product lifecycle from customers, captain and colleagues and articulating how the products deliver maximum business value to each specific market and department. • Consistently following industry and competition movements and driving problem solving with relevant stakeholders to guarantee that the products and services remain relevant, differentiated and both technically and financially sustainable.
• Creating roadmaps for Careem's Data Science team, driving improvements in product experience, data accessibility and growth. • Leading a team of Data Scientists and cross-functional teams of 10-15 people and contributed to ETA reductions of 50-70%. • Developing data-driven feature prioritization processes by building business cases providing transparency to stakeholders. Introducing A/B testing to mature the processes of rollout and impact of features. • Conceptualizing and delivery of strategic projects to fuel growth: o Launch of a scalable peak pricing service providing real-time pricing and heat maps (Feb 2016) o Careem’s promotion infrastructure (March 2015), multiple partnership integrations, rebranding and localization of apps o Captain incentives schemas and bonus systems • Leading the Data Science team in forming a strategy for developing Big Data capabilities to enable seamless data accessibility for reporting, data exploration and real-time data transformation for products and services. Capabilities include: o Customer segmentation to help target and customize the product for (potential) high-value customers. o Dispatching simulation tool to create offline testing of algorithms. o Geo-spatial analyses and reporting. • Driving technical scalability with Engineering by identifying bottlenecks and designing more scalable solutions to constantly be prepared for 10x growth.
• Leading Careem’s Product development as the first Product Manager, joining as employee number 5. • Supporting the launch of customer apps for iOS/Android (Jan 2013), Careem’s on-demand service NOW (Mar 2013) and Careem Repeat (Sept 2014). • Managing cross-functional teams of 5-10 people for development of several products including Careem’s customer and captain apps. • Developing innovative and business critical components to support scaling and rapid growth: o Pre-scheduled dispatching engine to support reliability, scalability and growth. Manual interaction reduced from100% to 5%. o Preventive exception handling service to increase call center efficiency. Time saving of up to10x per agent. o First peak pricing engine to support reliability. Increased reliability of service during peak timings of up to 30%. o Careem’s captain loyalty program to sustain long-term relationships with captains. Launched in June 2013 and still in use. • Designing and implementing the complete dispatching algorithms for on-demand and pre-scheduled bookings to optimize for high utilization, reliability and distributed captain earnings. • Introducing and maintaining Careem’s reporting infrastructure using MySQL databases, Google Analytics and third-party visualization tools to build dashboards for KPI tracking to set the foundation of becoming data-driven and result-oriented in all departments of the organization. • Supporting the launch for Careem’s first geographical expansion in Doha, Qatar (April 2013) by training captains and launching marketing campaigns creating initial monthly growth of 100%.