When you talk to very senior leadership they'll talk about the difference between "strategic" and "operational".
Directors set strategy. Senior managers try to implement that.
Directors set strategy. Senior managers try to implement that.
Consider allocating resources to an email client vs. a web browser, then figuring out how much to focus on enterprise vs. small business vs. consumer, then figuring out user stories.
All require different analyses - a PM who should be asking specific customers for feedback would be ineffective if they also needed to agonize about the financial consequences (market size, biz dev team readiness to sell into that market, CoCA) of choosing those customers. And even the latter decisionmaker may be better able to focus by having a departmental budget, and letting the C Suite decide if browser dominance is something that maximizes shareholder value.
As a developer these things should seem self-obvious because ideally they were anticipated a year prior, headcount was allocated, and you were recruited at the right time. It’s rarely perfect, of course. But it doesn’t have to be - people don’t need to row in sync down to the millisecond, but without a coxswain there’s no hope.
"My (two) guys were very mechanical. Every 30 seconds, they wanted the stroke rate and the position of the boats that were even with us or ahead of us. Guys really need to know where they are... We control the psychology of the athletes in the race ... You try to wring every last bit of power out of those athletes. If you do that, you can lose a race and eventually come to terms with that."
Any manager out there, at any level, would nod and approve.
Middle management is a fairly involved process of finding people who are doing things that aren't according to strategy and stopping them.
Most of middle managements time is monitoring that everyone is doing what they said they would do, and motivating people to do what the business needs - by hook or crook. A good manager will make the supervisors uncomfortable at the right moment on the right subject. The supervisors will then get things done that the strategy requires in conjunction with their team.
It is remarkable how quickly people will start working against each other without management. I worked on a mine site where the miners sometimes tried to dig out the access to the mine; and while that was extreme people working at cross purposes to each other is common. Someone in any large company always wants the equivalent of rewriting the software from scratch; they need to be found and stopped.
The basic answer is that operational roles are focused on the current phase of work. Middle level roles are focused on co-ordination. Higher level roles are focused on future phases of work (and managing external stakeholders).
For many of the senior roles the reasons the work is less visible is because it's either in situations employees aren't, or considered confidential. For example, CEO meeting with investors is a big chunk of work, but it's not that visible to employees. For an example of the second, I'd say 'organisational design' and areas of investment are often confidential as they have implications for hiring/firing.
The board meets and talks and decides everyone is going mobile and that becomes a goal.
The senior level managers (ceo/coo/vp of departments) come up with a general strategy around mobile for their departments. Marketing VP might decide to change CRMs . They come up with a plan that involves getting a budget approved for the assessment phase (meeting with vendors, sme, etc). Based on that they put a presentation together to get support/budget for the next phase. During this time they might try to see synergies with other approved projects with budgets and try to fit in the CRM changes within them. If approved they move to the implementation phase where the work goes to the development manager and/or vendor management. A pm gets assigned the project. They meet with the vp and keep them updated. When the project is finished reports are written and sent back to the VP. The VP makes year end presentation on what they did to achieve the goal. They would report things like mobile engagement up 10% after CRM upgrade. CEO would report to board 80% of customer facing sites are now mobile friendly. Next year we plan to do 100%.