Vocanic

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

What it does

Vocanic’s flagship offering was the Media Command Center, two integrated products built around enterprise social media management.

VSocial was the Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform: a centralized 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 visualization product built to run on dedicated screens in client offices and agency war rooms. It showed live brand health, competitor tracking, campaign performance, influencer activity, and community manager SLAs on one always-on display. The point was to put social data in front of the people who had to act on it, in real time.

Publish and manage content in VSocial, then track its impact and everything else moving around the brand in Mission Control.

My role

I worked my way up to Director of Products, with a strong technical focus, and owned the VSocial stack. The job sat between product and engineering: driving the roadmap, working with the engineering team on backend and infrastructure decisions, and taking 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 with enterprise clients, producing video tutorials, and writing all the product documentation. I was a big part of pre-sales too, turning complicated product capabilities into proposals and demos that closed, which fed a meaningful share of annual revenue.

On the technical side I stayed hands-on with the key infrastructure work: a custom SOLR search implementation, and auto-scaling for the burst traffic social media generates (post spikes make load wildly uneven). I built out ad-hoc data reporting pipelines. And I translated business requirements into something engineering could actually deliver.

Over six years the technology organization grew a lot, the company expanded into several markets across the region, and revenue kept climbing. It was an early lesson in what it takes to build a product business and keep it running.