This is a huge mental error that people make over and over again. There is no absolute "what" and "how", they are just different levels of abstraction - with important inflection points along the way.
The highest level of abstraction is to simply increase happiness. Usually this is accomplished by trying to increase NPV. Let's do that by making and selling an accounting app. This continues to get more and more concrete down to decisions like "should I use a for loop or a while loop"
Clearly from the above example, "increase NPV" is not an important inflection point as it is undifferentiated and not concrete enough to make any difference. Similarly "for loop vs while loop" is likely not an inflection point either. Rather, there are important decisions along the way that make a given objective a success. Sometimes details can make a massive difference.