The digitalization of working life has lead to extensively changed conditions for work in both classical and emergent professional groups. In classical professional groups, e.g. within healthcare, impacts of such changes in daily work has attracted attention in various research communities focussing among other on adaptations in ways of working or changed patterns of collaboration. However, as a consequence of the society’s digitalization of work and leisure practices, new occupational settings and professional groups have emerged where it can be argued that new forms of knowledge and competence have evolved and become highly specialized. Among these professional groups a recurrent activity is assessment and evaluations of end-services and products. During assessment activities colleagues orient towards digital tools, designs and activities by negotiating understandings of quality. Yet, the work practices of such emerging occupational groups are unexplored in relation to how work is constituted and how professional knowledge becomes a subject matter among the professionals themselves. In this paper, we address these questions by exploring the conditions for collaborative work between colleagues in the IT support sector and computer game development industry. The aim is to explore how professional knowledge and competence are displayed and negotiated during different forms of assessment activities. Theoretically and methodologically we study naturally occurring activities of working life with a focus on participant interaction and the participants’ ways of orienting towards phenomena relevant for conducting work. In the paper, Goodwin’s (1994) notion of professional vision is central for teasing out the participants’ ways of assessing features relevant for the community of practice and making visible local knowledge and learning in the professional field. The empirical materials consist of video recordings from evaluation practices from a global IT support and from a game award event with participants from the computer game industry. Preliminary findings point to participant driven textual and interactional practices of negotiation. In these negotiations domain specific knowledge is displayed by participants through forward oriented reasoning and by addressing the relation between the particular case and general aspects of that case. The paper illustrates these findings by exploring practices deeply connected to work activities and settings as well as products. In the IT support milieu, collaborative assessment activities separated from the daily handling of support errands found a basis for discussing and developing ways of working. The forward oriented assessment orientation by participants is shown in cases where documented errands in IT-systems are reviewed and reformulated into suggestions of future actions by explicating local knowledge emerged within the organization. The participants in the game evaluation setting rely on hands on and “back-seat gaming” as assessment practices in order to establish shared access to the phenomena being assessed, and via such demonstrations negotiate particular game demos qualities and potentials in the future in relation to established game genres. In both settings, individual cases are used in different ways as textual and interactional resources for highlighting ways of seeing more general characters adhering to specific cultural values and organizational issues for the particular occupational group.