The actual duties and qualifying capacity need assessment. Knowledge about management procedures is not the same as performing managerial or executive duties.
Choose the analysis from the real work
Explain what the applicant knows and does. A specialist applying advanced organizational procedures may present a different factual case from a person who directs a team or function; the terminology alone does not decide it. One way to tell them apart is to ask who is accountable when a decision turns out badly.
A specialist who recommends and a manager who approves may sit in the same meeting over the same file, but only one of them answers for the outcome. Ask the employer to name the person who answers, and the account usually resolves in a sentence. Hypothetical example: a greenhouse climate-control specialist writes the environmental set points every site runs, and no grower departs from them without consulting her.
She still holds no authority over those growers' hours, hiring or discipline, and a site manager may overrule a set point on operational grounds. That is influence flowing from knowledge rather than managerial authority, and it belongs in an L-1B account rather than an L-1A one. The opposite pattern exists as well, and where the applicant's honest answer is that they run the function, preparing a knowledge case wastes the evidence that would actually have supported the other.
Either way, the proposed position, the qualifying foreign employment and the company relationship still require their own assessment.