[unfocussed_mike]

You are missing one of the great untold truths of engineering: non-technical people can be just as brilliantly intelligent.

They just don't speak your language or have your experience.

You do not particularly need to dumb it down. You do need to think about which things they actually need to know, and provide some backstory that helps them contextualise it.

Get good at this and your life will be enormously better. Keep this attitude and you will find your world shrinking.

[nulbyte]

I agree wholeheartedly with this. I have lost count of the number of times I have found a solution to some problem after explaining some technical detail to a layman who then suggested something I wouldn't have thought of.