Earlier this week I was taking off my well-used Skullcandy Skullcrusher headphones when, inexplicably, one of the earpieces broke off. I was pretty bummed about this because I’ve quite liked these headphones.

On a whim, I thought, “Is there any chance they would still be under warranty?” I’d heard Skullcandy was pretty awesome about such things, but still, these headphones are like three and a half years old. However, when I went to Skullcandy’s website to try to process the warranty return, it went without a hitch. Basically the website said, “Were you being irresponsible and stupid when they broke? No? Then they are fully covered.”

That’s pretty sweet.

So I sent them back to Skullcandy yesterday. I went to the UPS store where the clerk made an interesting comment. He said, “Oh, yes. We’ve seen a number of people send their headphones back to Skullcandy before.”

It occurred to me that this was potentially an example of how a single metric, taken out of context, could be completely misinterpreted. The UPS store clerk, probably unintentionally, was nevertheless suggesting that Skullcandy headphones get sent back to Skullcandy more frequently than perhaps some other brands. One might assume that perhaps Skullcandy headphones get sent back more frequently than headphones by, say, Sennheiser, Grado, AKG, Denon, or Audio-Technica because those headphones are quite a bit more expensive than Skullcandys are, and are therefore presumably of higher quality.

However, this statement also implies that Skullcandys get sent back more frequently than headphones that are much cheaper. How can that be?

Actually it is pretty easily explained if those cheaper brands do not stand behind their headphones. If I buy a $70 pair of Skullcandy headphones, being fully aware of the lifetime warranty, I’m much more likely to send those back than a set of $5 junk headphones by some no-name brand that probably don’t have a warranty anyway. And if that is the case, it is much more likely that the UPS store clerk sees packages getting sent back to Skullcandy more frequently. Additionally, if I hate the $5 headphones, I’m likely to stop using them when I realize they are junk, so it is likely they will never actually get used enough to break.

In other words, given a simple measurement (frequency of headphones getting sent back), the most obvious explanation (that brand of headphones is low quality) may not necessarily be the correct interpretation, once further context is applied (headphones that sound great will be used more frequently and therefore are more likely to break; broken headphones only get sent back to a company that stands behind their product).

It’s why it is so important to known exactly what you are measuring and to interpret the measurement correctly. And it’s why it is so important that, as an employee, you understand exactly what measurements are used to determine your performance and how they are interpreted.