If you’re a premium subscriber, add the private feed to your podcast app at In this episode, we dive into the fast-emerging discipline of AI evaluation with Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar, creators of AI Evals for Engineers & PMs, the #1 highest-grossing course on Maven. After training 2000+ PMs and engineers across 500+ companies, Hamel and Shreya reveal the complete playbook for building evaluations that actually improve your AI product: moving beyond vanity dashboards, to a system that drives continuous improvement. In this episode, you’ll learn: • Why most AI eval dashboards fail to deliver real product improvements • How to use error analysis to uncover your product’s most critical failure modes • The role of a “principal domain expert” in setting a consistent quality bar • Techniques for transforming messy error notes into a clean taxonomy of failures • When to use code-based checks vs. LLM-as-a-judge evaluators • How to build trust in your evals with human-labeled ground-truth datasets • Why binary pass/fail labels outperform Likert scales in practice • Evaluation strategies for complex systems: multi-turn conversations, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows • How CI safety nets and production monitoring work together to create a flywheel of continuous product improvement References: • Read the newsletter: • AI Evals for Engineers & PMs: • A Field Guide to Rapidly Improving AI Products: • Aligning LLM-Assisted Evaluation of LLM Outputs with Human Preferences: • Aman Khan: • Anthropic: • Arize Phoenix: • Braintrust: • Beyond vibe checks: A PM’s complete guide to evals: • Frequently Asked Questions (And Answers) About AI Evals: • Hamel Husain: • LangSmith: • Not Dead Yet: On RAG: • OpenAI: • Shreya Shankar: Listen:  • YouTube: @lennysreads • Apple: • Spotify: • Newsletter: Follow Lenny:  • Twitter/X: • LinkedIn: • Podcast: @LennysPodcast Subscribe • YouTube: @lennysreads • Apple: • Spotify: • Substack: Follow Lenny • Twitter: • LinkedIn: • Podcast: @LennysPodcast About Welcome to Lenny's Reads, where every week you’ll find a fresh audio version of my newsletter about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career, read to you by the soothing voice of Lennybot.