One of my favorite ways to sum this up is thinking tactically (who and why) vs operationally (what and how).

The third layer on top of all of this is strategic thinking (in theory, what your executive team is providing... even higher level and longer term abstract goals).

Your executive team thinks strategically about what the goal is, your engineering management thinks tactically about the people and tasks needed to complete the goal, your engineer thinks operationally about how to build or design the work in each task.