Look at any PM's calendar and count the meetings whose only purpose is finding out where things are.
"Weekly sync." "Project catch-up." "Quick status check." Half an hour, six people, everyone taking turns to say what they've been doing while the PM types it into a spreadsheet.
Every one of those meetings is a small confession. It's the PM admitting that, without gathering everyone in a room, they don't know what's going on.
Why it matters
On its own, one status meeting isn't a disaster. The problem is what it tells you about everything else.
If the PM needs a meeting to know where things stand, the board isn't up to date, the tickets aren't telling the story, and nobody trusts the tools enough to look at them. The process that's meant to make progress visible has quietly stopped working, and the meeting is papering over the crack.
And it's expensive. Six people for thirty minutes is three hours of work, every week, spent telling one person things a decent setup could have told them for free.
How to spot it
Watch the questions. A bad PM asks things in meetings that the board already answers, because they haven't looked at it, or because it's wrong.
Watch standups. A good standup is about unblocking people. A bad one becomes a round-robin of reporting, with everyone facing the PM like they're giving evidence.
Watch what happens after. If the meeting's main output is the PM updating their own tracker, the meeting exists for them, not the team.
And check their calendar. If it's wall-to-wall syncs and catch-ups, ask when they actually do any project management.
To be fair to meetings
Not every meeting is a confession. Standups that unblock people are useful. Planning sessions are useful. Retros, done properly, are useful. Talking to clients is very much the job.
The test is simple. Is this meeting for making decisions and solving problems, or is it for collecting information that should already be visible?
If it's the second, the fix isn't a better meeting. It's a better process.
What good looks like
The best PMs know where things are before they walk into the room. They read the board. They glance at the commits. They have the odd two-minute chat at someone's desk. By the time a meeting starts, status is already known, and the time can go on the stuff that actually needs people in a room together.
The result is fewer meetings, shorter meetings, and a team that spends more of its week building things than describing them.
If you need a meeting to find out where your project is, the meeting isn't the problem.