Why AI evals are the hottest new skill for product builders | Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar (creators of the #1 eval course)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
To build great AI products, you need to be really good at building evals.

**Hamel Husain** (0:03)
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're building an AI application, you just learn a lot.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:12)
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.

**Shreya Shankar** (0:18)
The goal is not to do evals perfectly, it's to actionably improve your product.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:22)
I did not realize how much controversy and drama there is around evals. There's a lot of people with very strong opinions.

**Shreya Shankar** (0:28)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
What are a couple of the most common misconceptions people have with evals?

**Hamel Husain** (0:38)
The top one is, we live in the age of AI, can't the AI just eval it? But it doesn't work.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:45)
A term that used in your post that I love is this idea of a benevolent dictator.

**Hamel Husain** (0:49)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:09)
Today, my guests are Hamel Husain 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 share 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 have 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 AI lab. In this conversation, we do a lot of show versus tell. 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 Hamel and Shreya 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'SLIST when you purchase the course, you'll get 35% off the price of the course. With that, I bring you Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar. This episode is brought to you by Fin, the number one AI agent for customer service. If your customer support tickets are piling up, then you need Fin. 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 bake-offs with competitors, Fin 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. And Fin is trusted by over 5,000 customer service leaders and top AI companies like Anthropic and Synthesia. And because Fin is powered by the Fin AI engine, which is a continuously improving system that allows you to analyze, train, test and deploy with ease, Fin can continuously improve your results too. So if you're ready to transform your customer service and scale your support, give Fin a try for only 99 cents per resolution. Plus, Fin comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Find out how Fin can work for your team at fin.ai.lennys. That's fin.ai.lennys.