Businesspeople need to understand both the marketing side and the product side. Trying to separate the two is dangerous for any company. I have worked with some smart marketing people who just didn’t understand the product and ended up harming the business. The best marketing people I have seen are those who work hard to understand the big picture. They make better decisions and are much better at earning clients’ trust.

One of the reasons that techies have a hard time with “the marketing people” is that people on both sides have a narrow and insular view of what marketing is.

Marketing is understanding the desires and motivations of the users. Marketing is empathy. Marketing is too important to be left to just the marketing department.

When a developer decides to change a complex and intimidating form into a 3-step annotated wizard so people can understand it more readily, that’s essentially a marketing decision. Most good developers understand this intuitively, even though they don’t consider it a marketing thing.