I still walk into every room asking the same question. What is broken here, and how could it be better?
I grew up in Adana, a city in southern Turkey with no access to the sea. As a kid I used to ask my father: why did they not build it by the coast? It would have been so much better. He never had a full answer. I never stopped asking.
That habit, walking into a place and immediately seeing what could be smoother, what friction could be removed, what was designed without really thinking about the person using it, has followed me everywhere.
My father worked in the public sector. He was the one who first showed me that companies have names, logos, stories, structures. I would ask him questions about them on the way to school. I learned early that I could explain things to people and make them see what I was seeing. I liked being in front of a crowd. I liked the moment when something clicked for someone.
There is a saying in Turkey: if Real Madrid offers you a contract, you sign. If Bogazici offers you a place, you go. I was in the first 5000 students in the national university entrance exam, and Bogazici was possible. I went.
I studied Management Information Systems. The choice was deliberate: I wanted to be in the middle of technology, coding, communication, and management. MIS taught me something no single course ever could. How to stand between technical people and business people and make them actually understand each other. How to look at a system and see not just what it does, but what it could do.
At Yemeksepeti I handled over 400 customer interactions a day in a call centre. I learned something there that has shaped everything since. When you listen to people in a certain way, when they feel genuinely heard, they stop being aggressive and show you their real problem. Hungry people are angry people. Listened-to people are honest people.
At Okul.com.tr I grew an Instagram audience from 15K to 55K in eight months. I was not an experienced social media manager when I started. The first thing I did was run persona sessions with my team to understand who was actually following the account and why they would care. Then I made my team believe we could go further than the goal anyone had set. The rest followed.
At Labrys Consulting I worked across 19 international markets and discovered something that broke my model of the world. I had always assumed people were rational decision makers. They are not. Highly ranked managers changed their minds because of details no one would ever think mattered. I came away with a not-harmful obsession about small details. I am doing okay.
Bogazici has an organic connection with Berlin. Graduates come here, build things here, leave their knowledge here. I always wanted to spend part of my life in this city. I arrived for a Masters in European Business Management at TH Wildau and became active almost immediately.
A few months in, I ran for Student Parliament and got the fourth most votes in the election. I was responsible for the anti-discrimination committee, focused on international students and their needs. That work made me see the frictions of the university up close. Students could not find basic information without clicking through five different systems. Events were announced in places nobody checked. The onboarding experience for new arrivals was cold and confusing.
So I did what I always do. I decided to fix it.
I built Unicore on my own. A working campus app for TH Wildau students, not a concept or a mockup. About Campus, Events, CampusVoice for anonymous feedback, a Marketplace, and Campus Charades, a game built specifically around the university's places and culture to help new students feel at home faster.
When I had something real, I started presenting it. First to my faculty, then to the team responsible for the university's existing app. That route went nowhere. Emails went unanswered. The established path was not going to open on its own.
So I kept knocking. I believe in disruptive technology. Even when the current establishment resists, the right idea finds its way through eventually. You just have to be patient enough and persistent enough to find the people inside the institution who think the same way. I found them. They exist in every organisation. You just have to get past the ones who do not answer their emails.
Eventually the right conversations happened. I was asked to become a Student Assistant, helping to redesign the university itself as a student-centred service. Now I build bridges between students and administration. I run workshops and surveys, create student clubs, and help shape the direction of the university as a service.
Once, after a simple survey at the mensa, students told me they were genuinely happy just to be asked. Just to feel included. That moment stayed with me. It is the kind of work I want to keep doing.
My closest friends would describe me as communicative, caring, and someone who speaks his mind. When I am stuck on a hard problem I call my mother or father. They approach things differently from each other and from me. They rarely give me the right answer. They always make me look the other way.
I am not primarily a technical person. I can build things, and I do, but what comes naturally to me is people. Reading a room. Finding the right angle to make someone see what you see. Knowing when to push and when to listen. That is what I bring to every project, alongside the code.
I am bad at drawing. Everything else I figure out.
The persona tool I built came out of a real problem. In a service design class at TH Wildau, students created a persona called Lukas to understand how the university felt from a student's perspective. I researched every persona tool I could find. They were all built for marketing teams. None of them let you talk to the persona. So I built one that does. You can try it at the tools page.