Negotiated a 4-day week + same salary at a Manchester design studio as a Product Designer

The offer letter came through at £62k full-time hybrid, and my first reaction wasn't the excitement I expected after 41 days of searching and five rounds of interviews. It was more a quiet dread. I'd spent the last two years working four days a week at my previous company, and I genuinely wasn't sure I could go back to five without resenting it from day one. The search itself had been grinding. I sent out 22 applications across Manchester and a handful of remote-friendly studios, heard back from a fraction, and most of the interviews I did land felt like they were going nowhere. The conversation with the design studio started differently, partly because I came in through a referral from a designer I'd worked with a few years back. That warm intro meant the first call felt less like an audition and more like a conversation about what the team actually needed. Over five interviews they walked me through their research process, their design system, and how product sat alongside engineering. Thorough, but it never felt adversarial. When the written offer arrived I sat on it for a day before responding. I knew I wanted to ask for the four-day arrangement, but I'd seen that conversation go badly before, companies treating it as a red ↓