Nearly every CMO knows the moment when dashboards stop being the answer and become the question itself. You have the tools, the data streams, and the automated reports landing at 6 AM sharp to visualize your KPIs. Yet unclarity remains.

Three agencies pull numbers from different platforms, each telling a different story about the same campaign. Your team spends Tuesday mornings reconciling metrics instead of shipping valuable results. The CEO wants ROI proof; the CFO wants payback timelines; but your fine strategy gets lost in context switching and daily business overwhelm.​ ​

One of the big problems I observe is, teams mistake dashboards for decisions. They confuse reports with rhythm. The often dangerous assumption, that more visualisations deliver more clarity, persists in many companies. But the solution instead is, that clarity comes with focus on few, relevant data points. It comes, when analysis meets direction, and direction meets action.

To solve this, darive exists. ​ 

Why data fog, silos, and tool sprawl sabotage your initiatives

Dashboard and reports overload isn't a tooling problem. It's a decision rhythm problem. ​ ​

Mid‑sized organizations face a particular chaos: Enough data to drown in, leading to data overload, and not enough coordination and focus to really take directions and move. Marketing runs Google Analytics; sales lives in the CRM; also product has its own tracking. And all these different dashboards being created in Tableau, Looker Studio, PowerBI – or even worse in all of them.

Each dashboard promises clarity, but together they create what a CMO might call "reporting theater" – beautifully staged numbers that are never able to answer the real urgent question: "What do we do next to improve our business?​". And each new dashboard and report worsens the problem.

Teams postpone initiatives because they can't agree on a baseline. Pilot projects multiply, while only few of them ship to production. Often much later than planned. Budget conversations turn into negotiations, leading to decision paralysis. This isn't about lacking data. It's about a missing connection between data and action: Data-inspired ideas, hypothesis quality, prioritization, focused experiments and steady adoption. ​ ​

More dashboards won't fix missing clarity and decision paralysis.

What instead helps?

The darive answer: The data-inspired empowerment track

In order to overcome "death by committee", you'll need a repeatable decision and action rhythm, spanning over your complete customer journey. This ingredient is crucial for success and progress. It convert insights into relevant experiments, experiments into outcomes, and outcomes into abilities. Abilities that your team owns internally.​

darive: the name, the claim, the philosophy

darive arrives to deliver an answer and a solution to all this. Where does the name come from? It's a neologism, purpose‑built to hold the space between knowing and doing. ​

DA - a quiet beginning to give importance to data and analytics, the foundation. RIVE - drawn from five words that map the journey: derive (analysis), arrive (direction), thrive (sustained growth). They drive (energy) your projects forward by leveraging data, inspiration and automation. They dive into data points to uncover hidden insights (depth).

Thus the pronunciation is: day‑rive. ​

Use it as a verb: "We didn't just analyse our funnel. We arrived at clarity, and we took action. Thus, we finally darived at a really excellent experience." ​

The claim: discover. inspire. thrive.

discover. Not more reports, but the right questions. Strategic clarity rooted in what the data contains and can reveal. And what the business needs. ​

inspire. Different and deeper insights. Hypothesis quality over amount. Human creativity empowered to aggregate and simplify. Reach effective, data- and facts-backed decision-making. These are the capabilities that really bring data analytics to the next level – and not only that but your complete business. That kind of prioritization that makes your CFO lean in and your team say "Finally, this is something highly interesting we can try out ourselves now."

thrive. Ideas don't count until they ship. Pilots don't prove value until they reach the surface and start to scale. Everything grows towards execution and outcomes, that your organization itself owns. ​

The founder story: Data clarity meets creativity

My name is Thomas Gerstmann. For 20 years, I acted directly at the intersection of data strategy, advanced analysis, and excellent user experiences for mid-sized companies and international enterprise level companies like ERGO, Volkswagen, design-bestseller or databyte. Finally, the pattern became clear: The problem was never the data. It was the gap between only tracking and analysing data on the one side, and getting into action on the other side. That gap closes when you go one more step ahead than what most frameworks ignore: Data inspired and empowered people that finally unleash their creativity and productivity. ​

I'm a photographer and visual artist - you'll find my work at objektivaufunendlich.de. Practicing creativity and arts taught me something that spreadsheets couldn't: Creativity is the divine spark that really makes the difference. This is not only true for arts, but creativity also is a driving force in the field of data, analytics and optimization. This can make the defying difference, when it comes to turn raw data into inspiring new angles. It can come up with unexpected "darivations" that are really worth to be tested. It's the difference between dashboards that only inform with data visualisation – and decisions that finally ignite bold action in order to move your business.

The values that shape darive

A gut feeling that is steadily trained and backed by data and facts.
Less ego. More data. More optimism. More action. ​

• People over metrics. Numbers serve humans - not the other way around. ​
• Cooperation over competition. The best outcomes emerge when we work for each other, not against each other. That's why I invest time pro bono to stop global hunger - because the data points reveal the urgency of the issue. together we achieve more. ​
• Openness to new insights over ego. Exactly this fosters greater engagement. In this context, data helps to stay humble; not a subjective assumption is most important, but embracing objective data and facts. Collaboration in such a way keeps the teams mind sharp and helps to avoid overwhelm. ​
• Facts based optimism. It means bringing courage when others hesitate, especially in challenging times like today. Have hope and optimism when data and dashboards themselves sometimes provide a dimmed outlook. To gain clarity, as a first step, is always within reach. Isn't this already a very valuable step? ​ And when clarity is gained, next steps are already as good as taken. Let's get this moving.

Gain your momentum today

darive is here to support you overcome dashboard paralysis. The shift begins when you stop asking, "How many website views do we have?" and start asking, "What new powerful hypothesis does this inspire – and – which of those can we ship in the next 30-90 days?" 

If you want to go even deeper into this topic now, I recommend you to read my next blog article about analysis paralysis and how to overcome it. 

To make your next step, get the new darive Benchmark Check – it will be available soon. It maps your data-decision maturity and shows where momentum can begin today through clear data strategy, effective data usage and creativity being applied to data analyses. ​

To stay tuned about the Benchmark Check launch, join the darive Waitlist now (see below). We'll inform you. No sprawl, just clarity, direction, and outcomes and performance that you can measure in weeks. ​