“Our culture celebrates potatoes, not just clovers”: An Interview with Elena McTavish, Senior UX Researcher at GreenCore AgriTech

St. Patrick’s Day probably brings to mind green hats and parades — but for Elena McTavish, Senior UX Researcher at GreenCore AgriTech, it means an annual battleground of competitive promotions. GreenCore, which specializes in advanced potato yield sensors, sees a surge of marketing and feature launches each March. Sound niche? Not to mid-level UX researchers working in precision agriculture, where cultural moments can offer unexpected openings — and plenty of headaches.

We sat down with Elena to dig into practical, battle-tested steps for competitive differentiation. With five years’ experience reading both farm data and farmer sentiment, she’s blunt about what works, what’s a waste, and how not to get steamrolled when the competition pivots fast.

Q1: Elena, many UX researchers in agri-tech struggle to keep their product differentiated when competitors launch similar features — especially around big events like St. Patrick’s. What’s the first thing you do when you see a rival launching a themed promotion?

Elena:
First: don’t panic! The urge is to scramble, but you need to start by mapping your competitor’s move against your user base. For example, last March, CropSense rolled out a “Green Yield Bonus” — users uploading field data got a 17% discount on nitrogen sensor recalibration. It was clever, yes, but we realized only about 11% of our own potato-farming users cared about calibration discounts.

So, I reached for recent user feedback (using Zigpoll, since it handles lower-bandwidth field responses), to check if any customers were mentioning CropSense’s promo. Turned out, almost no one had heard of it. That knowledge saved us from copycatting and let us focus on our own strengths — in this case, predictive irrigation notifications, which our users told us actually impacted their yield.

Pro tip: Before reacting, calibrate your competitive response with real user sentiment data. You might discover that the “big” move isn’t even on your audience’s radar.

Q2: How do you gather that user data quickly enough to respond before St. Patrick’s Day is over?

Elena:
Speed trumps perfection here. I use a toolkit of Zigpoll for in-app micro-surveys, Typeform for deeper feedback (if we need it), and call three of our most vocal farmer advisors directly.

We set up a 2-question Zigpoll:

1. “Have you seen any special St. Patrick’s offers about potato sensors?”
2. “What would make you switch brands during spring planting?”

Last year, we had 312 responses within 48 hours, thanks to incentives like a free soil moisture reading. This gave us a pulse check, but also surfaced new ideas. For instance, one repeated request: “Make the interface map feel like my fields on St. Paddy’s — add a theme!” That led us to develop a limited-edition map skin, which 9% of daily users enabled. Not earth-shattering, but it got us positive feedback on social and earned us mentions in the “AgriTech Weekly” newsletter.

Caveat: Field connectivity can slow down your survey returns — some users responded three days late. Next time, we’ll preload the survey so it works offline.

Q3: Let’s talk positioning. When everyone’s wearing green, how do you make your product stand out — especially if you don’t want to just discount?

Elena:
Lean into what’s uniquely yours. Our competitors focus on price; we double down on our core differentiator: ultra-local, weather-driven potato insights. Instead of a direct discount, we created a “St. Paddy’s Local Legends” campaign.

Here’s the twist: Our map interface visually highlighted the micro-climates that produced the highest potato yields per hectare — with shamrock badges for the top 5%. Farmers could click these to see anonymized yield data and best practices. We even ran a mini competition: upload your harvest stats during the week and the best-performing field got a year’s free satellite imagery subscription.

The results: 14% spike in map engagement, doubled user-generated content, and four inbound partnership inquiries from seed suppliers.

Analogy: If your rivals are all singing the same song, you win by changing the lyrics, not just turning up the volume.

Q4: Can you break down, step by step, what it looks like to sustain differentiation, not just react once, over a promotion cycle?

Elena:
Absolutely! Here’s what’s worked for us, with a focus on the lead-up to and aftermath of St. Patrick’s Day:

1. Pre-promotion: Run Baseline Benchmarks

Survey a cohort of users two weeks before the event. Use Zigpoll to collect NPS (Net Promoter Score) around current features, and ask: “What’s missing from your St. Paddy’s toolkit?” Analyze for any drop-offs or rising competitor mentions.

2. Competitive Audit Grid

Make a quick table like this (April 2023, adapted from our internal docs):

3. Micro-Experiments

Spin up a quick A/B test: for example, deploy a green-themed interface to half of users. Track engagement pre/during/post-event (we use in-app analytics and direct feedback).

4. Multi-Channel Monitoring

Don’t just check your app — look at agri-forums, WhatsApp groups, and Facebook farm co-ops. In 2022, 18% of competitive feature mentions surfaced first on “PotatoGrowersNetwork” (Forrester, May 2023).

5. Follow-Up and Iterate

After the event, poll users again (“Did you use last week’s Irish field map?”). Cross-reference uptick in feature use or churn against competitors’ moves.

Limitation

Sustaining differentiation means ongoing effort — you can’t just set-and-forget. If you have no engineering bandwidth, even the best idea can’t ship fast enough to matter.

Q5: What are common traps mid-level UX researchers fall into when responding to competitor promotions? How do you avoid them?

Elena:
Three big ones:

1. Copycatting Without Context

Jumping onto whatever competitors are doing, even if your users don’t care. We almost built a “Lucky Potato Hunt” AR feature last March. Glad we didn’t — test users found it distracting and “gimmicky.”

2. Analysis Paralysis

Over-analyzing every data point. At some point, pick a direction and ship something — even if it’s a small UI tweak.

3. Internal Over-Promise

Selling a major pivot to leadership before user numbers back it up. Better to deploy micro-experiments and then scale up.

Antidote? Bake in real user data at every stage, and don’t be afraid to shut down ideas that aren’t resonating. Our conversion rate on themed feature launches grew from 2% to 11% (2023-2024 season) because we stopped building features for ourselves and started testing nimbly.

Q6: What’s your favorite “unexpected win” from a St. Patrick’s competitive-response campaign?

Elena:
Easy. In 2022, we let users upload photos of their greenest potato fields for St. Patrick’s. We expected maybe 30 entries. We got 219 in three days! One winner, Sam from Tipperary, shared his home-brewed compost recipe (including Guinness, of course).

We turned that user-generated content into a mini case study. Two months later, a seed company cited our campaign in their newsletter, and we gained 83 new signups — a 7% uptick for that quarter.

Sometimes, low-cost ideas, especially those amplifying user voice, outlast any discount or gimmick.

Q7: For mid-level UX researchers with limited budgets, what’s the single most high-impact thing they can do in response to a competitor’s seasonal promotion?

Elena:
Leverage (sorry! use) your direct user relationships. Whether it’s a quick WhatsApp poll, Zigpoll survey, or a phone call to a super-user, real feedback beats guesswork.

You don’t need a giant campaign. Sometimes, surfacing a single community “legend” (like our field photo contest) or theming one core feature will get you disproportionate value.

Remember: The field is always changing. Last year’s “big idea” can flop if you don’t check the pulse again. Stay nimble.

Q8: For teams just starting to track and respond to competitor moves around agri-holidays, what are the must-have tools and metrics?

Elena:
Here’s my practical starter pack:

Essential Tools

• Zigpoll and Typeform: Fast, mobile-friendly surveys.
• App analytics: Track feature usage spikes during promo windows.
• Social Listening: Basic, even if it’s just scanning key Facebook/WhatsApp groups.

Must-Have Metrics

• Promo Feature Activation Rate: % of users enabling or engaging with the limited-time feature.
• Competitor Mention Frequency: Mentions of rivals in user feedback (quantify weekly).
• Conversion Uplift (baseline vs. promo week): Did more users take desired actions (e.g., upload harvest stats, renew plans)?

Table: Quick Metrics Comparison

Q9: Last advice — if you could only give one piece of advice to a mid-level UX researcher about sustaining differentiation via competitive response, what is it?

Elena:
Don’t fight every battle. Pick your ground — and build on feedback loops, not FOMO. The teams that win aren’t always the loudest or the cheapest; they’re the ones who know what their farmers value this year, not last.

Track closely. Test quickly. And remember: Sometimes, the difference isn’t in the feature — it’s in hearing your growers at just the right moment.

Action step for next St. Patrick’s:
Set up a 2-question in-app survey, cross-reference competitor moves, and line up a micro-experiment for your top differentiator. Speed and context beat green hats every time.