Why AI evals are the hottest new skill for product builders | Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar (creators of the #1 eval course)
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Why are evals the highest‑ROI skill for building AI products?
To build great AI products, you need to be really good at building evals. It's the highest ROI activity you can engage in. This process is a lot of fun. Everyone that does this immediately gets addicted to it when you are building an AI application. You
just learn a lot. What's cool about this is you don't need to do this many, many times. For most products, you do this process once and then you build on it.
The goal is not to do evals perfectly, it's to actionably improve your product.
I did not realize how much controversy and drama there is around evals. There's a lot of people with very strong opinions.
People have been burned by evals in the past. People have done evals badly, and then they didn't trust it anymore. And then they're like, oh, I'm anti-evals.
What are a couple of the most common misconceptions people have with evals? The top one is: we live in the age of AI. Can't the AI just evals?
Ballot, but it doesn't work. A term that you used in your post that I love is this idea of a benevolent dictator. When you're doing this open coding, a lot of teams get bogged down in having a committee do this. For a lot of situations, that's wholly unnecessary. You don't want to make this process so expensive that you can't do it. You can appoint one person whose taste that you trust. It should be the person with domain expertise. Oftentimes it is the product manager.
Today, my guests are Hamel Hussein and Shreya Shankar. One of the most trending topics on this podcast over the past year has been the rise of Evals. Both the chief product officers of Anthropic and OpenAI shared that Evals are becoming the most important new skill for product builders. And since then, this has been a recurring theme across many of the top AI builders I've had on. Two years ago, I had never heard the term Evals now. it's coming up constantly. When was the last time that a new skill emerged that product builders had to get good at to be successful? Hamel and Shreya have played a major role in shifting evals from being an obscure, mysterious subject to one of the most necessary skills for AI product builders.
They teach the definitive online course on Evals, which happens to be the number one course on Maven. They've now taught over 2,000 PMs and engineers across 500 companies, including large swaths of the OpenAI and Anthropic teams, along with every other major. In this conversation, we do a lot of show versus tell.
What are the common misconceptions about evals and the “benevolent dictator” role?
We walk through the process of developing an effective eval, explain what the heck evals are and what they look like, address many of the major misconceptions with evals, give you the first few steps you can take to start building evals for your product, and also share just a ton of best practices that Hamill and Trey have developed over the past few years. This episode is the deepest yet most. Understandable primer you will find on the world of evals. And honestly, got me excited to write Evals, even though I have nothing to write Evals for. I think you'll feel the same way as you watch this. If this conversation gets you excited, definitely check out Hamel and Shreya's course on Maven. We'll link to it in the show notes.
If you use the code Lenny's List when you purchase the course, you'll get 35% off the price of the course. With that, I bring you Hamel Hussein and Shreya Shrey. Shankar. This episode is brought to you by Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. If your customer support tickets are piling up, then you need Finn. Fin is the highest performing AI agent on the market with a 65% average resolution rate. Fin resolves even the most complex customer queries. No other AI agent performs better. In head-to-head fakeoffs with competitors, Finn wins every time. Yes, switching to a new tool can be Scary, but Fin works on any help desk with no migration needed, which means you don't have to overhaul your current system or deal with delays in service for your customers.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why are evals the highest‑ROI skill for building AI products?
0:00–2:10
2
What are the common misconceptions about evals and the “benevolent dictator” role?
2:10–22:28
3
How do you define an eval and see a concrete real‑estate‑assistant example?
22:28–53:39
4
Why does the host promote Mercury as the preferred fintech for entrepreneurs?
53:39–1:06:41
5
How do Hamel and Shreya explain building and validating an LLM‑as‑judge eval?
1:06:41–1:20:45
6
What are the main points of the debate between evals and A/B testing?
1:20:45–1:33:08
7
What quick tips and final thoughts do the guests share before the lightning round?
1:33:08–1:46:28
Speakers
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