Ride-hailing companies mostly compete on price. Discounts for riders, incentives for drivers, and a race to the bottom that neither side wins. I think that is the wrong fight. Almost every problem the industry complains about is a product problem wearing an operations costume, and the companies that work this out first will stop paying to buy loyalty they could have earned.
I have been working through this in a running series of articles, one question at a time: safety, personas, competitive analysis, pivots, the small moments that decide whether someone opens your app again. This post is the umbrella for all of them. It sets out the through-line, and points you at whichever article is closest to the problem you actually have.
The series is written from the back seat rather than the boardroom. I have taken more rides than a lot of new drivers have given, across several platforms in Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand, from two minute city hops to intercity runs long enough to learn a driver’s whole opinion of the app he works for. What follows is that experience read through twelve years of building and managing products: the same ride, looked at as a product decision.
A marketplace is not a storefront
The first question worth settling is what kind of business this is. A store sells you something and the transaction ends. A ride-hailing platform sells a promise that a stranger will arrive, drive safely, and behave well, and it has to keep that promise using people it does not employ and cannot fully control.
That difference changes everything downstream. Inventory becomes supply behaviour. Quality control becomes incentive design. Returns policy becomes dispute resolution. Treating a two-sided marketplace like a storefront with a map on top is the root mistake, and it produces roadmaps full of features that do not touch the thing customers are actually judging.
I worked through that framing in Ride-Hailing: A Business or Just Another Store?
The experience gap nobody prices in
Hotels worked out decades ago that service is a designed thing. Someone decided what happens when a guest arrives late, what a doorman says, how long a check-in should take. Ride-hailing inherited none of that discipline, and it shows in the gap between a ride that technically completed and a ride that felt good.
The gap lives in small moments: the wait after you book, the message when the driver is stuck, the handover at the door, the thirty seconds where a rider decides whether they feel looked after or merely transported. None of it shows up in a completion-rate dashboard. All of it shows up in whether they open the app next week.
Two articles cover this: The Missing 7-Star Experience in Ride-Hailing on what a genuinely excellent ride would look like, and Micro-Moments, Major Impact: Ride-Hailing Needs a Hospitality Upgrade on the specific moments worth designing. If you want the general version of this argument, I have also written about how user frustration is a signal rather than a failure.
Safety is a product decision, not a compliance checkbox
Every platform says safety is a priority. Fewer treat it as a design problem with owners, roadmap space, and trade-offs against revenue. The honest test is what happens when a safety feature costs conversion. If it gets cut, safety was marketing.
There is also a version of this that most product teams never consider, which is what the platform knows that nobody is using. A ride-hailing network holds continuous data on vehicles, routes, and identity. Some categories of crime become much harder in that environment, if anyone builds for it.
See Ride-Hailing Safety: Beyond Regulations, Prioritizing Riders Over Profits and Can Ride-Hailing Apps Stop Car Theft?
Who are you actually building for?
Most ride-hailing personas are decorative. A slide with a stock photo, an age range, and a sentence about convenience. They get made once, presented, and never used to decide anything.
Useful personas are uncomfortable, because they force you to admit that the woman travelling alone at eleven at night, the driver working a twelve-hour shift, and the parent booking for a child are not the same customer and cannot be served by one flow. On a two-sided platform this doubles: the driver is a user too, and driver experience is rider experience with a delay.
That is the argument in User Personas: Are Ride-Hailing Services Really Listening? The wider method behind it is in Discovery 101, product discovery for founders who are not product people.
What to do when the market is saturated
In a crowded market, teams tend to do one of two things. They stop looking at competitors because everyone looks the same, or they copy whatever the market leader shipped last quarter. Both are ways of avoiding a decision.
Competitive analysis is useful when it tells you where nobody is serving anyone well, which is usually a segment or a moment rather than a feature. And when the answer is that the current model cannot work, the pivot has to be a deliberate product decision rather than a panic, with a clear read on what you keep and what you abandon.
Those two are covered in Why Competitive Analysis Still Matters in a Saturated Ride-Hailing Market and Pivoting a Ride-Hailing Business, Lessons from the Industry. If you are not sure which kind of problem you have, this piece on telling a product problem from a marketing problem is the place to start.
The through-line
Read together, these articles make one argument. Ride-hailing companies keep reaching for pricing and supply levers because those move numbers this month. The decisions that actually compound are product decisions: what the experience feels like in the moments that matter, who you have honestly decided to serve, whether safety survives contact with a revenue target, and whether you know what your competitors are failing to do.
Those decisions are slower and harder to defend in a quarterly review, which is exactly why so few teams make them. It is the same trap I described in The Prism of Priorities: the loudest input wins, and the important work never reaches the top of the list.
The full series
In reading order, starting with the framing and ending with the practical work:
- Ride-Hailing: A Business or Just Another Store? What kind of business this actually is.
- User Personas: Are Ride-Hailing Services Really Listening? Who you are building for, on both sides of the market.
- The Missing 7-Star Experience in Ride-Hailing What excellent would look like.
- Micro-Moments, Major Impact: Ride-Hailing Needs a Hospitality Upgrade The small moments that decide loyalty.
- Ride-Hailing Safety: Beyond Regulations, Prioritizing Riders Over Profits Safety as a design problem.
- Can Ride-Hailing Apps Stop Car Theft? What the platform already knows and does not use.
- Why Competitive Analysis Still Matters in a Saturated Ride-Hailing Market Finding the gap nobody serves.
- Pivoting a Ride-Hailing Business, Lessons from the Industry Changing direction on purpose.
Where this comes from, and why it travels
None of this comes from inside an operator. It comes from using these services heavily, in more than one country, and paying attention to what kept happening. Riding across markets is its own kind of research: the same problem shows up in Lahore, Manila and Bangkok with different local clothing on, which is usually a sign you are looking at something structural rather than a local failure of execution.
That matters beyond ride-hailing, because ride-hailing is an unusually clear window into problems every two-sided product has: matching supply to demand in real time, keeping quality consistent through people you do not employ, and earning trust in a transaction where the customer is briefly vulnerable. Food delivery has the same shape. So do marketplaces, logistics platforms, and any service where a stranger shows up.
If you are building something with that shape and the numbers are moving in the wrong direction, the question worth asking is not what to discount next. It is which of these product decisions you have quietly postponed.
Tahir Shahzad
Tahir Shahzad is a Product Manager, Product Owner, and technology consultant with over a decade of experience helping startups and organizations build products people actually use. If you are working on a product problem worth solving, reach him at tahirshahzad.com/contact/
