The time zone, in real hours
Türkiye stays on UTC+3 all year. That is seven hours ahead of US Eastern time in summer and eight in winter. A team that starts its afternoon block at 4 p.m. local time is available from 9 a.m. Eastern, which leaves two to three hours of overlap for calls every working day.
The rest of the day works in your favor: questions asked in your afternoon are often answered, and fixes deployed to staging, by the time you start the next morning.
Communication that does not depend on meetings
The teams that work well across time zones write things down. Look for a written scope, short written updates, a shared task board and a staging environment you can open at any time. Calls are for decisions, not status.
Ask a prospective partner to show you a scope document and a progress update from a past project, with client details removed. The quality of their writing predicts the quality of the collaboration.
Contracts, IP and code ownership
Make sure the agreement assigns intellectual property to you, that repositories and cloud accounts are created under your organization, and that credentials live in your systems. Most experienced teams are used to signing NDAs and working under US contracts.
This is not legal advice; have your counsel review the agreement. But a partner who resists owning-by-default terms is telling you something.
How to evaluate quality
Look at products the team has shipped and can show running, not only screenshots. Ask for a short paid discovery or a small first milestone before committing to a long engagement. Review the code from that milestone, or have someone you trust review it.
At METEK Technologies we run ten products of our own, from CostAnswer to Ahi AI, and we encourage clients to open them before a first call.
Where to start
Pick a project with a clear boundary: an internal tool, a customer portal, an AI agent for one workflow, or a mobile app with a defined first release. Use it to learn how the collaboration works. Our page on working with a team in Türkiye covers time zones, ownership and payments, and what we build for US companies lists the rest.