Vocanic

Vocanic was a Singapore-based tech company building SaaS products for social media management and campaign execution. The core platform — VSocial — gave brands and agencies centralised control over their social media presence: publishing, engagement, analytics, and campaign management across channels. Vocanic was acquired by WPP/GroupM in early 2014.

What it does

Vocanic’s flagship offering was the Media Command Center — a combination of two integrated products built around enterprise social media management at scale.

VSocial was the Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform: a centralised hub for content publishing (with multi-level approval workflows), conversation management across all social channels, social customer care, campaign analytics, and social CRM with identity tracking via SSO-based social login. Brands could manage community managers, enforce compliance through full audit trails, track SLAs, and build a unified view of their social audience.

Mission Control was the real-time intelligence layer — a data visualisation product designed to run on dedicated screens in client offices and agency war rooms. It surfaced live brand health, competitor tracking, campaign performance, influencer activity, and community manager SLAs in one always-on display. The idea was to put social data in front of the people who needed to act on it, in real time.

Together, the two products covered the full loop: publish and manage social content via VSocial, monitor its impact and the broader social landscape via Mission Control.

My role

I rose through the ranks to Director of Products, with a strong technical focus — primarily owning the VSocial stack. My remit sat at the intersection of product and engineering: driving the roadmap, working closely with the engineering team on backend and infrastructure decisions, and representing the product directly to clients.

On the product side: strategic roadmap planning, feature scoping, competitor research, pricing, and go-to-market support. I was heavily client-facing — running onsite training sessions with enterprise clients, producing video tutorials, and authoring all product documentation. I was also a key part of the pre-sales process, translating complex product capabilities into proposals and demos that converted — contributing to a meaningful share of annual revenue.

On the technical side: I was hands-on with key infrastructure work — a custom SOLR search implementation, and infrastructure auto-scaling to handle the burst traffic patterns inherent to social media (post spikes drive highly uneven load). I also built out ad-hoc data reporting pipelines. I bridged the gap between business requirements and engineering delivery.

Over six years, Vocanic scaled the technology organisation significantly, expanded into multiple markets across the region, and achieved consistent revenue growth. It was an early lesson in what it takes to build and sustain a product business from the ground up.