Furkan Akyurek

TRT Dinle is a digital audio streaming service that contains millions of songs, audiobooks, and podcasts along with a number of exclusive recordings available to users on iOS, Android, web, OTT platforms, Apple CarPlay, and Android Auto. It's a well-received product that got 250,000 downloads during its beta phase within a few months and scored a 4.9/5.0 rating on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

I came up with the idea of the product and pitched it to the management to get approval on the team hiring and building the MVP. Then I coordinated the content gathering with the internal stakeholders for exclusive content and external parties to arrange the licensing agreements. I was also managing the designs, product strategy, and execution to ensure the product quality was top-notch. Furthermore, I led the planning and implementation of the data collection methods and the standards applied for various platforms and started the initiative to gradually increase the level of personalization for higher retention. As the head of the project, I planned the digital growth and marketing plan with the marketing department.

NewsHQ is a real-time news monitoring solution built to help news producers, researchers, and interested parties detect breaking stories, search archived content, and understand the local trends. NewsHQ is built to enable the users to easily select the news sources they like and start tracking them on their dashboard. The user is alerted whenever a breaking news story comes up or an entity becomes trending globally or in a specific region. The tool also helps journalists understand the stories by automatically translating them into English.

I came up with the idea of this innovative project and was responsible for its execution and implementation. I led the product research to figure out the best UX approach for journalists to use and guide developers in finding innovative solutions to difficult problems. As an internal product, it became one of the most used tools within the company and across the staff.

TRT World News Quiz was one of the first voice assistant applications developed for Google Home and Amazon Alexa, offering users daily questions based on the news events of the week.

We developed a unique persona for the application and conducted many user research sessions to capture the user flow and different accents accurately. Instead of the machine voice, we used the human voice, which increased user satisfaction and perceived app quality. Our app won the attention and appraisal of many early adopters, acquiring thousands of daily active users a couple of months after our soft launch.

AssetHQ is an asset management solution allowing users to store images, video, text, and audio files with ease. The files can be accessed by all the users and easily be searched and filtered using the Elasticsearch implementation. For the video publishers and news producers, AssetHQ is directly integrated into over 30 content management systems used within the company, enabling easy access to an ever-growing catalog of more than 20 million assets.

I was in charge of the ideation, stakeholder handshake, and execution phases of this project. I organized meetings with a number of internal stakeholders and end users to understand the use cases and pain points and developed a structure where all parties were satisfied. In the development phase, I led the product roadmap and phased releases to the users, along with the training sessions to onboard the end users. The product became quite successful and has been used ever since by even more users than we initially expected.

The Blackbox VR game is the result of extensive research and interviews with social aid workers, psychologists, journalists, and refugees. It was one of the projects in my R&D division.

I led the ideation and execution of the project with no prior knowledge of the virtual reality ecosystem. Within a month, I hired a freelance 3D GFX artist, two voice-over actors, a producer, and two programmers to develop the application. After consulting with the experts in this area, we created the storyboard and game development. With a small budget and tight deadline, we successfully launched this product to both Steam and Oculus VR marketplaces.

TRTBelgesel.com.tr is a website for the largest documentary channel in Turkey. I was tasked with making a website that reflected the channel's brand vision and style guidelines to offer the visitors easy access to documentaries and episodes.

I was in charge of revamping our existing CMS to handle the new structure this project demanded. I also worked with our designer to develop a website design that would reflect the channel's new brand vision. Owning the stakeholder discussions, the product roadmap, and the product sprints, I ensured we were releasing a fully functional project during the hard launch of the channel. The website was ready with hundreds of live videos by the deadline, and there were no scalability issues despite massive traffic directed by TV ads and digital marketing efforts.