Sarita grew from Marketing Lead to General Manager of Uber Greece

Today, Athens-based Sarita Varouch is our Head of Greece for Rides. But since joining Uber over 8 years ago, she’s driven her growth through a series of roles starting in marketing that have allowed her to think bigger, do more, and reimagine the art of the possible. The most impactful transition across Uber? “The transition to the GM role…through it I learned so much, from pivoting the business model to rebuilding and expanding it both on the product side but also geographically,” she says below.

“I joined Uber a few months after I returned to Greece, having spent the last 5 years in the United States. During that time, I experienced the Silicon Valley environment and I was drawn to building something from scratch. Being able to do it in my own country felt like a dream job (spoiler: I was right!). Back then, Uber was expanding into different countries, establishing a team of 3, and I was part of the Greek team leading our local Marketing efforts. Given the startup phase, the role was so much more than what I expected, pushing me to solve challenges in all facets of the business, making it an amazing experience. 

As the country grew, the local team grew as well and the work we did was so much more than business growth. We directly saw the impact we had on the lives of people both from the lens of creating opportunities; much needed as Greece was deep into recession as well as building more mobility options for people to move around. I pursued the Head of Country/General Manager role in Greece in 2018 when we had to pivot our local strategy and although there have been a few bumps along the way, it has given me an opportunity to grow massively as a professional and do work that I love with an amazing team! I am still very passionate about our vision and extremely proud to be leading our local efforts in a market with so much potential.”

“What I love about Uber is the wide range of opportunities to pursue. We have colleagues that completely shift careers and have successful second (or third) careers within the company. In my case, my path was less of a radical pivot but rather an evolution. Having been a marketing professional for my entire career, moving to a Head of Country/General Manager was a bit unconventional at the time but it worked great for me. It pushed me out of my comfort zone from a Marketing and PR lens to a full business owner, from formulating local strategy to running operations to engagement with external stakeholders to being a spokesperson, all while building and managing a team. 

The opportunity came at a time when Greece went through a tough point and we had to rethink our business model. Although I was considering other internal opportunities with a marketing focus at the time, I realized that the parts of the job I really enjoyed were the change we were bringing to the local community and I knew that I wanted to lead that change. I started getting involved in more operations focused projects, and engaged with more cross-functional teams in order to learn and better prepare me for the role change, while also asking my manager for more opportunities. Lastly, I relied on my Uber network for learnings and advice and I think that all of these contributed to setting me up for success.”

“The transition to the GM role was the most impactful on my career progression and development. Through it I learned so much, from pivoting the business model to rebuilding and expanding it both on the product side but also geographically. 

Leveraging my local experience while doing a short-term assignment with the Hailables team, we were able to bring Greece to the top-performing EMEA Taxi markets. Hailables team is focusing on growth and expansion of hailable products (i.e products that can be hailed in the street) within the Uber app.  The global perspective that the assignment gave me enabled me to think bigger for my market too and focus on the initiatives that would be scalable and allow us to grow faster. It also gave me the tools to better advocate for internal resources as well as being able to find synergies with other markets. 

Another example is our summer launch of Uber Boat, a global Uber pilot in Greece this summer. Our Uber Boat pilot was featured in our annual Go Get Event and received global media attention. Representing a small country and being able to get so much exposure while we build something new is an accomplishment I am very proud of. My team has been key to making this happen as they work tirelessly with global teams to find creative solutions for challenges that arise. I am very keen to see how this pilot can impact the deployment in other markets.”

“In 2020 I wanted to grow further, especially in terms of geographic scope, and explore more opportunities within Uber. My mentor suggested trying a short-term assignment and not long after I found one that made perfect sense. It was on the Global Hailables team focusing on Taxi and street hailing products. Greece’s main product was Taxi. I was supposed to spend a few months in Amsterdam during my assignment, but right after I took the position travel pandemic restrictions hit which essentially had an impact on my short-time relocation to Amsterdam and I ended up staying in Athens instead. 

Even though I did not physically move, it was still quite challenging adapting to the additional responsibilities on top of my regular role. I had to meet and work with my new team (sitting in Amsterdam), work with the different country leads across EMEA, LATAM and APAC, and establish how the global team works with different markets––doing all of that remotely. The good thing was that because of the nature of a small market, remote collaboration was a big part of my existing role so the transition was not as challenging. On the other end though, it was less the case for the team there and we all needed some time to adapt. I proactively reached out to meet the people I would work closely with, committed to attending some virtual social events of the Central Ops team so that I would get to interact with the broader team. We set up some quick coffee chats with a few colleagues to catch up (imitating what we would do in the office). By the end of it, I had the feeling that we knew each other quite well, so when we ended up meeting in person, it felt strange we hadn’t met before.”

“A few years back I was very uncomfortable with change, which came in contradiction with my ambitious nature. I worked on that quite a bit over the last couple of years and a few things that worked for me were:

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