As a tech manager with twenty years experience, I can assure you, in fact, engineers are people. And they interact with those MBAs, project managers, etc. The really good product/project people understand this as well, and make a point of doing their very best to be effective when interacting with the engineering team. They know how expensive we are, and try to bring our our best.

To the point of this article, the best product people were in fact respected by the tech team, and it made all the difference.