[cauterized]

In a large company, the VPE isn't managing engineers. S/he is managing managers. If the VPE is capable of people management, project planning, etc. (the line manager's actual responsibilities) in addition to the VPE responsibilities (strategy, hiring pipeline, and the like), then the line managers will be happy. If the line manager is capable of building software, the engineers will be happy.

The VPE doesn't have to be a software engineer, just a decent people manager with enough tech background to not be completely lost when the line manager informs them that we need to make room for a couple extra weeks of maintenance in the schedule next year because our vendor is changing their API format and we'll need to rebuild the integration. (The line manager is the one who needs to understand what the engineer means when s/he says that the vendor is discontinuing their SOAP API in favor of a RESTful JSON API.)

Domain knowledge (groceries, space flight, whatever) is important to a degree for an exec involved in strategy decisions. But they need domain knowledge related to the current shape of the market and the pros and cons of currently available solutions - not the technical details of how those solutions work.