By Janus Boye
Jon Marks, Chief Technology Officer at Pugpig won the 2025 Small Feature Award held at the Boye Aarhus 25 conference. Photo: Roar Paaske
What’s that one small feature that makes a product so much better?
Every year at the Boye Aarhus conference, we celebrate those unsung heroes — the tiny, elegant product touches that deliver outsized impact.
This year, Pugpig took home the Small Feature Award, after CTO Jon Marks impressed the audience and judges alike with a six-minute live demo that showed how much difference a small feature can make.
The winning feature? A clever “secret” admin menu that gives real-time visibility into Google Ads performance — helping publishers quickly see how their digital ad setups are running.
The best part? Jon shared that it took just two days for one person to build — and it now saves days of work every month.
A small feature to make a big difference in the app
Pugpig is the leading digital publishing platform used by the world’s top media brands to deliver beautifully crafted, high-performing apps and websites. From The Economist and Condé Nast to The Independent and Tortoise, Pugpig powers the digital experiences that keep millions of readers engaged every day.
Founded in London, Pugpig was born from a simple idea: to make it easy for publishers to bring their content to every device, seamlessly and reliably. The platform combines flexibility with rock-solid performance, helping publishers launch quickly, iterate easily, and connect meaningfully with their audiences.
MORE ABOUT WHAT JON SHOWED US…
Behind the technology is a team of passionate technologists, designers and strategists who understand the challenges—and the opportunities—of modern publishing. Whether it’s supporting daily news apps, member magazines or podcast integrations, Pugpig brings innovation, stability and a genuine love of media to everything it does.
The 2024 judges were Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Shannon Mølhave. Photo: Roar Paaske
Small features are the unsung hero of the workplace
Besides Pugpig, we also saw some really good live demos from past winners Agility CMS who joined us all the way from Canada to show live coding and MCP in action. Specifically the demo showed how adding a new section to a website can be made much easier.
Another past winner who joined was Kontent.ai from Czech Republic who showed how an agentic CMS makes life easier for an editor by suggesting site wide changes.
Little Forest from the UK won back in 2019 and showed us how to manage a sprawling web estate with some help from AI.
Besides Pugpig, Formcentric from Germany was also a first-time participant and they showed us a nifty small feature to make the creation of new website forms easier.
Enjoy the power of live demos
When I worked at a CMS vendor in Germany from 1999 - 2002, live demos were an important and daily part of my job. Back then there were no pre-recorded elements and certainly no way of doing it remotely. You brought your laptop and made it work, and when it worked, it was incredibly powerful. Like the old adage, where a picture says a thousand words, a live demo could cut through lengthy documentation, requirement specifications and numerous workshops.
Think about how important the driving experience is when you buy a car. Would you buy a car just based on some slides? Or perhaps more in the same price range, would you buy a house to live in just based on a fancy deck from a slick realtor? No, you wouldn't, right? But why are so many then buying enterprise software, upwards of millions of dollars, without actually trying it out?
Or like our North American Group leader Matthew McQueeny has said in the past:
“Software presentations without live demos are akin to concerts without the band playing the songs”
To keep the art of the live demo going, we’ve integrated them into our conferences for the past decade and you can experience it next at these upcoming events:
CMS Kickoff 26 in January in Florida
CMS Summit 26 in May in Frankfurt
CMS Connect 26 in Montreal in August
Boye Aarhus 26 in Aarhus in November
Congratulations again to Pugpig for proving that sometimes, the smallest ideas have the biggest impact.
From left to right: Janus Boye, Shannon Mølhave, Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire, Jon Marks and Martin Michael Frederiksen. Photo: Roar Paaske