This is an older article, but it was brought up in a recent thread on the Elezea Community (join us!) and I hadn’t seen it before. In Applying Leverage as a Product Manager Brandon Chu explains how PMs can have the biggest impact in an organization:

Managerial leverage is the idea that some things a manager does creates more output than others, and for each possible thing, the amount of output created per unit of time is its leverage. That’s the basis of how you should decide whether to do activity A or activity B.

When internalized, these concepts impart on PMs a sense of what matters most in their role. They have lots of choices in what they can do everyday — all of which produce some positive output- but developing awareness of where they have leverage is critical to their long term impact.

The crux of it is this:

Product managers exert the most leverage through vision and strategy — the rest is optimization.

Brandon shares a very helpful framework about the different types of work product managers do, and the best way to balance that work.