AI Evals for Product Managers: A Beginner's Guide to Getting Started

AI agents operate differently from traditional products, producing nondeterministic outputs where the same question yields different answers, making traditional product analytics built for clicks and form submissions unable to examine this complex internal process. AI evaluations bridge this gap by helping product teams assess and enhance agent quality. If you treat evals as a chore, you will ship features you cannot measure, debug, or defend — but treating eval design as part of the job creates ownership over the loop between agent quality and business outcomes.