---
title: "a guest in business communications at boğaziçi"
url: "https://merterbil.com/talks/bogazici-business-communications/"
author: "Mert Erbil"
type: "lecture"
date: "2024-04-04"
place: "Boğaziçi University"
---

# a guest in business communications at boğaziçi

A guest session in a Business Communications class at Boğaziçi University on working in tech and living and working in a multicultural environment.

In April 2024 I was a guest in my dear friend Zeynep Kevser Meral's Business Communications class at Boğaziçi University. It was an online session with her students, and to be honest it was a great pleasure and so much fun.

The class was about business communications, so I didn't come with a product framework this time. Instead, I shared my own experiences in the tech industry, from the products I've worked on to the teams I've worked with.

Then we moved on to my story of moving, living and working (and surviving) in a multicultural environment throughout the years.

That part is close to one of the topics I keep coming back to in talks and mentoring, which is how product work, and design in particular, changes across cultural and language contexts. It's also why The Culture Map by Erin Meyer is one of the books I keep recommending to people.

So for me, a communications class was actually the right place for that story. Moving countries is, in the end, a communication problem as much as anything else, and I was happy to share the surviving part as openly as the rest.