Success story ACM Software Founder Mehmet Yitmen

EO Turkey newsletter starts to share the members’ success stories. The first inspiring story is from Mehmet Yitmen, Founder and Managing Partner of ACM Software. Introducing a new field of technology in Turkey, Yitmen managed to successfully run his business for the last 10 years. Here is his adventure.

“My career as an entrepreneur has started when I was still a graduate student. After graduating from Bilkent University Industrial Engineering Department, I began to attend Software Engineering Program in Boğaziçi University in 2007. It was the same year, two friends and I decided to start our own business. Our goal was to create a .com company, but after 6 months we realized that we were running out of money and it was impossible to keep the business running without investment. So, we started to create and sell software projects to subsidize our start-up. Then we noticed that, here in Turkey we were far behind the world in terms of software development technologies, both in the sense of managerial and engineering practices.

We decided to adapt a new management model for our projects and the engineering practices this model proposes, called Agile, which had been started to be widely implemented in the world since 2001. Turkish market was absolutely unaware of the field, so we started to share our knowledge and experiences with our clients. Thus we found the main focus of our business and specialized on Agile consulting and training for the last 9 years.

Since we were the first ones to introduce the Agile processes and practices to Turkey, we had to struggle for 3 years to create a market. Unlike the classic management models which use hierarchic flows, Agile approach proposes a learning based horizontal structures. Accordingly, it triggers a paradigm shift in the world. This was another huge challenge for us, to convince the companies that naturalize hierarchic culture to transform their management style. This remains as a challenge, even today.

We were the first company to provide Agile services in Turkey and its surrounding region and we are still in the leading position. Today, besides Turkey, we are also active in Greece, Qatar, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia. We represent our country and the region among the prominent global communities of our field.

My friends and I were really insistent to make Agile common in Turkey because we believed in its benefits for the companies. This still gave us an extra stamina to overcome the obstacles in entrepreneurship journey. Today, my biggest satisfaction about my job is being able to export technology know-how from Turkey. Although we usually think that Turkey is still in the developing phase in terms of countless topics, it feels great to think, “Not in our field, and we made it!”.